OVERVIEW
As part of our new national retail strategy, there was a focus on our digital initiatives. One of the larger pieces of that was our online application experience. Since we were looking to expand our sales footprint to regions where there would be no physical branches, the primary was that a consumer would interact with us and get one of our financial products would be through our online application. The application process that was in production was severely outdated and a clunky experience that caused many users to just drop off. My manager challenged me to design an experience that could be completed in about 4 minutes or less.
ROLE
At the time, I was working as a designer on our checking product and took the project as an opportunity to step up and be the sole and lead designer. I worked very closely with the product owner, who had been working on the application for 10 years as well our the main technical lead.
APPROACH
Since we had a current experience, I wanted to do an inventory of any past research and analytics that were done to understand the various pain points. Also, since it was designed before cell phones became mainstream, I knew that the main use case for the application would be someone on their phone. The product manager had a wealth of insight and knowledge to really helped as I started to dive in.
PROCESS
As part of the process, I mapped out the user journey to document the flow and see where we needed the improve the user experience. I've always equated the application as similar to an online shopping checking experience. If things are confusing, people will just abandon the site. So I focused on having it as simple and easy as possible as we analyzed the experience page by page.
I also created a storyboard to communicate with various stakeholders what we were envisioning for this next gen application. There were numerous paper sketches before the wireframes and research around best practices for form design. I also worked with our legal and compliance departments to ensure what I designed was compliant but I would also push for the ideal user experience.
DESIGNS
For the final designs, I also had to incorporate new branding styles that were being released as well as web accessibility. I really wanted to go for a clean design that allowed consumers to quickly flow through the application. A couple rounds of usability testing throughout the project gave me confidence in what I was crafting.
RESULTS
The work I did led to a significant increase in our digital sales as we saw our volume of applications grow from both the online channel as well as mobile devices. Through continual a/b testing and research, we've refined various aspects of the experience to get people to successfully apply within 4 minutes.