Page speed and speed to market
In January we got precisely the kind of brief we thrive on at Next. We were tasked by DFS with rebuilding the website for Standard Bank Life Insurance. In one month. The reason we could do this was because the business objectives were clear — improve the conversion rates of existing traffic online.
Clearly stated business objectives allow us to work faster by focusing our efforts on KPI’s that matter.
In the first month since launch organic traffic is up 76% month on month, Conversion Rate has increased between 60 to 80% across mobile phones, tablets & desktops and our speedy responsive design has increased leads by 32% & 35% on mobile phone and tablet devices respectively.
How We Did It
1. Performant design
Analytics showed us that traffic to the existing site was split across a broad cross-section of browsers, devices and locations around South Africa. Our design needed to work across a spectrum of device sizes and had to account for the shaky connectivity speeds experience by South Africans daily. That meant curbing aspirations for slick transitions and sparkly JavaScript, and focusing on pristine, bulletproof markup.
Good markup pays dividends on so many levels. One of the most noticeable improvements with the new website is in page load times — it outperforms several of Standard Bank’s other websites.
2. Onboarding
Transactional aspect of the previous website were tedious to complete. We focused on designing a faster and simpler process for these to reduce as much clicking as possible.
UX and Interface changes had to be implemented without any changes to the DFS transactional web services — so for our first version we have kept design clean and straightforward while we develop and test additional approaches.
We’re happy with what has been achieved in the short time we’ve been working with DFS, and will post updates as new features and design iterations come online.
