Deutsche Bank : Exposing executives

A new way of looking at board presentations.

The Site

Deutsche Bank, a German-based financial services group, has an elegant way of allowing quick browsing of management profiles.

Deutsche Bank provides information about its management in a sub-section of Our Company. Three separate pages deal with, respectively, Management Board, Group Executive Committee and Supervisory Board. All can be opened from the left-hand navigation, where they appear after clicking the ‘Management’ heading.

Information for the first two categories is presented in a neat split screen display: a list of names with job titles is shown down the left and the space to the right is for a photograph, brief biographical facts and the opening lines of a profile. The default setting is for the chairman; clicking another name in the list changes the right-hand part of the display to show their details. The full résumé can be opened (in the same space) by clicking ‘more’’; a ‘close’ button at the end of the profile resets the page to the brief version.

The Takeaway

Management profiles are a staple of company and organisation websites, and in the past year or so they have probably found more interested readers than ever. Yet, overall, presentations remain cumbersome and the standard stubbornly and numbingly low. Deutsche Bank shows the web can be used to do better in its creation of an interesting variation on in-page menus to enable quick browsing of content.

By splitting the main display area the index in the left half has effectively been turned into a supplementary navigation panel. Links then act more like tabs, changing the content in the right half rather than taking the user off to another page or down into the depths of the current one. The more/close option allows further expansion, again bringing extra detail to the reader not pushing them to it.

First published on 07 July, 2009