“Project Spartacus” was a 14 week Agile project consisting of 7 two week sprints. I worked as part of a UX/UI partnership to identify and refresh the key pages of the business website. The objective was to drive a 3% uplift in application starts per month for business current accounts. The result: an increase of over 20%.
User personas
We started by making sure we had a sound understanding of the audience and their needs. Our 5 SME personas represent the Audience Goals and Needs of HSBC's UK Business site.
UX review of existing site
We analysed the key Golden Path pages against the criteria of what the user does and doesn’t need in order complete an account sign up. We were able to determine that a lot of the page content within the current live site was not needed by the user. Similarly, some key content was missing.
Component consolidation and documentation
HSBC's website design was largely created in 2016 or earlier and difficult to track down in an editable format. The mobile and tablet documentation is non-existent.
To kick off the UI phase of work, I brought 93 components into a modern design platform (Adobe XD), largely recreated from scratch. We now had the building blocks of the website in one place, in a responsive, reusable format.
Paper prototyping
Using these components we sketched the page redesigns at a high level.
The hypothesis
The business site analytics showed us that the top 25 pages represent 85% of the traffic, of which 5 are the 'Golden path' from homepage to the BCA application.
We proposed to focus on this journey for streamlining and design improvements in order to have the highest impact on conversion.
Digital prototyping
Designing with XD meant that prototyping became part of the design process rather than a separate deliverable. I created an initial version for testing which I iterated on from sprint to sprint, pushing all updates live on the same review link.
User testing
I designed and built a fully interactive prototype which enabled us to conduct five one-to-one interviews with small business owners who matched the personas of Ella, Richard or Tina, our key target personas so we could get early feedback.
Homepage and product page refresh
Insights from user testing led to improvements in the key pages we identified as our ‘golden path.’
Imagery refresh
I also vetted and refreshed the imagery across key pages outside of the golden path to better represent both customer diversity and the topic of the pages.
Additional pages
We identified further high traffic/value pages within the wider customer journey, and added these into the golden path.
We kept this phase lean. Documenting all UI components upfront really sped up our workflow, since UX could be simplified to a minimum.
Key component redesign
Using Target to inject code we designed some key design improvements to prop up some of the more limited sections of the component library.
Personalised content and messaging to improve conversion
We also used Target to serve them an alternative homepage to existing customers. Data analytics through A/B tests will also enable us to identify users as personas and target content that better matches their needs to further improve conversion.
In summary:
Fully documented and improved design
This was a refresh rather than a full redesign but we were able to make improvements where necessary.
Clearer purpose
eg. We refocused the Business Internet Banking page's content towards its main goal of helping existing customer register for online banking.
User-centred, simpler journeys
eg. Everyday banking family page removed unnecessary content.
Users are kept on task with no distractions
eg. We've added clear paths for new customers to the business current account range page wherever relevant.