Small Business Banking Website
Discover
The brand was stagnant, analytics were practically nonexistent, and my design team was expected to maintain the site without resources.
Nobody cared – it was all soft cost to them.
Friction with Marketing compounded the problem.
Define
Comprehensive site audit and competitor evaluation.
We worked with stakeholders to define improvements, like a CD calculator and to prioritize journeys.
Design Goals
Refresh the brand.
Balance general information with industry-specific expertise.
Mend the relationship with Marketing.
Deliver on-time to support the digital loan application that was coming soon.
Architecture
Our audit yielded a new site architecture.
Content
Messaging frameworks were created to keep the tone aligned.
Disciplined workflows kept us all on the same page.
Wireframes to help partners visualize in advance of hi-fidelity design.
Multiple rounds of content testing ensured that messages were clear and on-brand.
Visual Design
We collaborated with Marketing on look and feel through a series of Visual OOUX Workshops
Concepts went through multiple rounds of iteration and testing to get them just right.
Interesting finding: We thought customers didn’t like stock photography but we were wrong. They missed it when it wasn’t there, but when it was it had to be meaningful and tied to the bank.
Final homepage design; visit liveoakbank.com
Conclusion
The website received the highest SEO ranking in its peer group, which has much larger banks like Huntington.
Conversion metrics aren’t available but assets grew from 11.3 to 12.3 billion in the period.
Reluctant stakeholders praised the outcome.
Senior leadership highlighted the work on an earnings call.
Most importantly, mindset shifted and the website was given operational and engineering support outside my team.
Description
Live Oak Bank
8 Jan 2024
The bank's website was an outdated, unmaintainable WordPress instance with fragmented analytics and no dedicated resources, creating hidden costs through outages and consuming valuable design team capacity on reactive maintenance.
Role
- Head of CX leading a team of 7
- Cross-functional alignment with partners
- Accountability for design outcomes
- Build enthusiasm and secure ongoing support
- Navigate Marketing’s role
- Manage communication across the org
- Conduct user testing
Business Goals
- Improve SEO rank and conversion rates.
- Future-proof the site for maintainability
- Empower Marketing with self-service capabilities