Making Financial Credit Easy Again
easyCredit by TeamBank — 2017
tl;dr
Full relaunch of public website and customer portal based on user research and customer feedback. Reached more than 100% growth in new business, significant decline in service calls and a stream of positive feedback from existing customers.
Role: Project and Design Lead
Challenge
In the early 2000s, easyCredit made a name for itself within the DACH region by bringing consumer loans online and simplifying the application process. Fast forward to 2017 and things were looking a lot different. Sales and customer numbers were not growing anymore, customer support inquiries rising. The aging website was in dire need of a refresh.
Transparency and security are two of the core attributes easyCredit ascribes to itself. With hidden information, confusing product descriptions and cheap graphics the old website didn’t do the service justice anymore. We were tasked with revitalizing the online business and bringing the brand in line with other modern, trustworthy services, by redesigning the easyCredit online presence.
Approach
In order to understand what the biggest problems for visitors of the easyCredit site were, we interviewed customer service agents and analyzed previous customer support interactions. We found that users were confused by the overall structure of the site and the seemingly conflicting information they found. It wasn’t clear what the exact conditions for a loan were and why they should choose easyCredit over other offerings. Worst of all, it wasn’t clear how many different types of loans were on offer, what the differences were and which was right for them.
To fully understand the situation and get a grasp on the problem, I performed a full content, module and page audit, listing and grouping everything that’s currently available on the page. The findings mirrored mostly what we had heard from customer support. Menus were bloated, with lots of pages with the same or similar information. Countless numbers of nested pages with no focus or information hierarchy.
Design
We approached design iteratively, in short intervals of building prototypes and testing with real users. In the first iteration, we restructured the overall information architecture throughout the site. We cut duplicate content and made the remaining content explicitly distinct. We got rid of the mega-dropdown menu and reduced navigation down to just a few pages. That way users got an instant overview of the available content. The main homepage was built as a hub, serving a summary and entry point for each of the sub pages.
For navigating long pages like the homepage, we came up with a dynamic directory for navigating the site while scrolling. Animation was crucial to get across how to use this so, in order to test our concept, I built up an HTML prototype of the homepage. That way testers could really experience the interaction, most understood it intuitively.
In the subsequent iterations, we built up other main pages in content and structure. These explained the available loan and add-on products, explained the company values, and how they translate to the products and offered help for every step along the way. Through testing with users, we could validate that these actually help in explaining and selling the offering.
Lastly, we built up a module system that documents how modules behave across devices and content, as well as how they could be used together with other modules. That way the team at easyCredit was able to continue working and experimenting with the site, keeping things up to date for the future.
The final site was built in collaboration with Strichpunkt and Ape Unit.
Impact
When the site went live, the impact on easyCredit’s online business was massive. Almost instantly, sales jumped by over 100%, the number of new visitors kept growing constantly. Service calls and overall activity for customer service dropped significantly, giving the internal teams more time to strengthen connections and setting up continuous communication between customer service and product management. EasyCredit went straight to work keeping up with feedback and further improving the site, while we were hired for the next project on the spot.
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