Vancity · 2020 ·
Web
I worked with Vancity to build a new website for current and prospective members. By reducing friction, we increased conversion rates over 500%.
Vancity had a great in-person experience but that didn’t translate to their online presence. Their site was difficult to use and not optimised for search or mobile traffic.
Members found the site confusing and didn’t know which financial products we offered.
We looked at which pages on the old site were most commonly used and where the drop-offs where to map the typical user flows.
For each financial product, we worked with customer-facing staff and members to understand the common questions people had and how typical conversations would play out.
This helped to focus our user journeys and plan content outlines.
It was difficult to get legal approval to put a work-in-progress website live in the financial industry. And without real traffic we wouldn’t know what would work.
We used usability testing software extensively but it was tough to say whether or not our changes would lead explicitly to more sign ups.
So, I led a collaboration with marketing to launch stand alone campaign product pages using our new designs. Each page was vetted by legal individually and a/b tested against a page in the original style.
The new webpages tested well. The conversion rate on a typical product page increased by over 500%.
As well as conversion increases, 69% of members, and 85% of staff, agreed that the new website represented Vancity better than the old one.
Security, performance, mobile and SEO measurements all increased.
The new architecture also meant we could spin up quickly. Like the Vancity Community Centre, that was created to support our members at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was designed, built and launched in under a week.
As part of this project, we also created a new design system unique to the website but familiar to Vancity’s overall design language that the wider design team had been developing.
A phased transition to the new site architecture was planned for 2021-22.