Brighter Side partnered with Boulder, CO agency TDA to deliver the UX strategy, content strategy, and UX design for FirstBank's website.

The project's overriding KPI was to increase consumer accounts though the web channel. 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.

Insights Come From Research

Research showed that people are most likely to open accounts in conjunction with a major life event and that many people still prefer to do so in person. This insight directed the inclusion of a simple location finder feature that displays on the home and account overview pages.

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.

Account Finder Feature

UX research showed that when consumers are considering a new financial institution, they want a simple way to find the right products. This led to a design feature that allowed consumers to display relevant accounts based on account type and minimum deposit amounts.

Mortgage Finder Feature

After completing the UX design for deposit accounts, FirstBank asked Brighter Side to take a similar design approach to their mortgage products. I used a similar filtering approach since site users were likely familiar with it and modified the parameters within the filters to apply to mortgage products. This means that site users only need to learn one method for finding products, no matter what category they're in.