Partnering with Boulder agency TDA, Brighter Side delivered an innovative approach to web banking.

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User Research: What Do People Want from a Bank?

The project's KPI was to increase consumer accounts. To meet that goal, I worked with the TDA account team to conduct interviews with internal stakeholders and customers. We also After conducting qualitative and quantitative research Brighter Side introduced a collection of design personas to drive the strategy. By doing so, we found that life events are the most frequent triggers for opening new accounts. So the design strategy focused on life events such as relocation to inform the work.

UX Design: Sketch Early & Often

Knowing that life events, some of them not so great, drive the task of finding a new bank, the content strategy dictated a reductive approach to the home page. Fewer components, shorter messages. User journey maps helped derive the contexts within which customers would need location and product information from the website. These maps drove the ideation phase, which included a series of lo-fi pen and paper sketches to explore design opportunities. From there, I designed high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes that were tested with FirstBank customers for both ideation and usability.

Result: Simplicity Wins Out

The result was a slimmed-down home page that prominently featured a branch location finder and quick access to consumer account information. On the account product overview pages, customers can select from a few simple filters such as average daily balance and savings goals to locate the account best suited for their financial goals. These tools are also on the mortgage page, allowing customers to find all of FirstBank's products using similar filter tools, lowering user's cognitive load and increasing conversion.