Illawarra Credit Union - Website Re-design
A complete redesign of ICU's existing banking website

Overview

Illawarra Credit Union are an Australia bank based in Wollongong, New South Wales. They offer competitive products and services in home and personal loans, credit cards, car loans, savings accounts, term deposits and debit cards.

The company came to New Republique for a complete website overhaul. After undertaking a complete rebrand, they felt it was necessary to give their website a full re-design.

My role was predominantly to work alongside fellow UX designer Jackson Alsop to cover everything UX for the project, this quickly led to becoming a project manager and front end developer.

The problem

The first problem was to understand the functionality of the website coupled with the tightness of banking security meant we had some limitations and couldn’t be completely creative. To solve the issue of long web forms, we broke sections of the form into pages, making it easier for the user to focus on a chunks of information at one time.

Another design problem was to house all the different types of content. Using templates, we came up with a solution to fit all 34 products into.

Business goals

Illawarra Credit Union created a new range of products to feature on the new website. They wanted to drive sales of the home loans, therefore they wanted the application process to be re-designed.

The challenge

The application processes were long winded, it required the user to download a 3 page PDF and send it back to the bank. Another challenge for the UX team was understanding all of the home loan and banking terms.

Consistency was a big challenge, making the site feel like one big design was important as this built trust within the user when signing up. We solved this by creating a template structure that held all products, and general content without breaking the flow of the page.

Getting the users to convert on the page was challenging, as a team we really thought about the users journey. One solution was to add tools and extra information to product pages, keeping the user on the same product page but accessing lots of info.

Compliance guidelines were something I had not worked with before, luckily the client was proactive in providing feedback about compliance.

Research

We gathered quantitative-statistics from friends, family and colleagues through Skype and phone conversations. As the subject of banking is so broad we asked as many people as possible and collated the information to identify the trends.

Analysis

Illawarra Credit Union had already researched their users and identified their key target audience. Having this extra research provided us with more in-depth knowledge about their users.

Persona development

An interesting pattern emerged between all personas. All personas were heavy mobile and tablet users, so it was essential that the experience worked great (if not better than desktop) on mobile/tablet devices.

User task flow

User flow diagrams were created to determine (in a typical scenario) how users would find the site, where they would end up and if this impacted the design.

Wireframes/sketches

We visualized the task flow into high fidelity wireframes using Sketch. Once all the main template pages were created InVision was used to create a fully working prototype to send to the client.

Gestures/animations

The UX team created animations to test concepts of interactions; these animations were built using Sketch and then animated with Principle. They proved a great resource when explaining to the client how elements of the site would work.

Development

New Republique’s in house front end/back end developers got to work with cutting up the designs. Wordpress was selected for the CMS (content management system) for the website because it was the most familiar for the client. As I was involved in the project from the beginning, I stepped into help out with front-end development and WordPress intergration. I provided assistance when working with the developers on helping them understand certain functions.

Statistics

Increases average session duration from 1:30s to 2:15s and reduced bounce rates. The average pages viewed per session was 1.09 with the new site it jumped to 3.23 (bearing in mind that the pages had more content). Grimm Booyens - Insight analyst

The outcome

New Republique delivered a user focused digital experience that concentrated on Illawarra Credit Unions latest products.

The team and I made the application process easier by breaking it down into stages, adding key features such as “Save for later”, integrated into long and complicated forms so the user could walk away from the form and still have everything saved.

The site is live and you can view it here.

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