UX Design
Reinvent Banking Experience Design
Project Overview
Huntington was in need of a fresh web experience that would challenge prospective customers to re-think what their bank offers and convince them to switch and experience the new innovative benefits and products that the bank would would be rolling out in the next few months.
Users and Audience
Huntington traffic comes from a variety of external sources including SEO, paid advertising, social, and direct traffic. Our team analyzed the Adobe Analytics data we had on our customers and their browsing tendencies to formulate a multi-pronged approach to drive primarily prospect customers to the account feature page. We knew early on that our primary KPI was to measure app starts on checking accounts and that a large quantity of traffic would be targeted using digital ads.
Roles and Responsibilities
My role and responsibilities were multifaceted in that I would work with UX, stakeholders, product owners, and marketing in order to define the content and from there to develop a templated approach to building new and re-shaping existing content all while ensuring SEO traffic was not negatively impacted. There was constant collaboration across the enterprise.
Scope and Constraints
The Scope of the project included designing a new homepage layout, a new account feature page, and subsequent product pages as well as solution for rethinking the consumer checking navigation. These pages are high impact and drive the highest customer conversions on the site so there was a great deal of scrutiny as we all worked together to push for a simplified and coherent user experience.
Process
The earliest process was to gather a core team to define the strategy. Some of the strategy had been well defined but there were many areas that needed definition. As a rough list of pages and elements began to accumulate we also were deep in the process of filming and shooting the brand campaign in the midst of a global pandemic, working remote, and collaborating in real time.
Once there were a number of solidified pages defined we started to work in Adobe XD to build out wires and low fidelity mocks that we’d circulate within the core team each week. The concepts continued to evolve as the brand campaign came to fruition. It was a day to day operation and a lot of pivots and strategy adds along the way.
Once the wires were in a good place I started to fill in elements and create a system for how I envisioned elements like cross sells, hero images, and featured product images throughout the experience using existing components within our CMS. The XD files were circulated and reviewed in UX reviews weekly. After finalized layouts were approved and content began to trickle in we were able to put layouts in front of UX research. We’d sit in on interviews and take notes on what users were seeing and reacting to. This helped us define the smaller details as well as find areas like terms and conditions that we needed to enhance to ensure a smooth experience.
From here we sent layouts and supporting elements, code, and videos to the web production team to implement, build, test, and eventually publish. This process was also guided by a legal and compliance team review to ensure regulatory needs were adequately met.
Outcomes and Learnings
This six month project had a lot of visibility for the brand and we had an opportunity to push the idea that Huntington Bank is indeed pushing innovations that help customers and is looking out for people. It was an incredible growth and learning experience especially considering the pandemic was in full swing for the duration of the project.
Our goals for the project we ended up exceeding as well which was a great accomplishment and we grew awareness for the brand along the way.
