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Building a Leading Consumer Digital Bank
As the design director, I led a team to design a frictionless multi-channel, multi-product onboarding experience in partnership with product, engineering and marketing.
The team decreased the digital application onboarding time from 20 minutes to under five minutes via design, new API’s, auto-decisioning (KYC) and instant bank verification.
The Situation
With a robust asset base of approximately $62 billion, Valley Bank was experiencing continuous growth and attracting an increasing number of customers daily. The leadership team recognized the necessity to create a seamless digital onboarding experience.
The business wanted to offer simple and transparent products for consumers to Save, Spend, Borrow, and Protect; nationally enabling a digital acquisition of new customers for Valley.
Design Challenge
How might we create a frictionless multi-channel, multi-product onboarding experience?
Impact
After the first six months of the relaunched experience, success metrics were:
- Reduced annual customer care costs by $88,200
- Reduced the number of manually-processed online banking applications by 50%
- 3X lift in funnel conversion
- Reduced the length of time required to open an account online from 20 to 5 minutes
- $10M+ in new deposits
Understanding the Problem
To accomplish this work, I built a 0-to-1 design team to partner with Product, Marketing, Engineering and Business Units to execute.
We redesigned the experience for opening a basic deposit product first.
Key Moments on the Customer Journey
Our team prioritized understanding the evaluate, decide, commit and onboard micro journeys.
Establishing a Baseline
To get a baseline understanding, we approached listening programmatically with our business partners using a seven-step process our team developed. This allowed us to communicate effortlessly with our partners in product, engineering and marketing. They knew what to expect and how we could use the information to make decisions.
Why was conversion low?
- It took 20 minutes to complete the application.
- The application was 12 steps.
- There was a 85% drop off at step two.
- Associates were touching 94.5 percent of applications. The risk tolerance was too low AND the right technology solutions were not in place.
- The bank was unfamiliar to most. Online reviews were neutral or negative.
User Flow
After conducting a design audit, removing unnecessary fields and gathering business requirements, we designed a new, simplified four step flow to open a basic deposit account.
Define
Problem Statement
We are going to provide an innovative, technology assisted account opening process in order to reduce burden on back office staff and reduce deposits for the business.
And, we are going to provide a seamless account opening experience in order to make it easy for our users to make their money work harder for them.
The Users
Ideate
Leadership wanted us to reskin the out-of-the-box third party solution.
Low-Fidelity Prototype Testing
I created a prototype of the reskinned out-of-the-box design. This allowed me to surface usability issues and clear the path to get investment to design a modern, user-friendly account opening.
View the prototype in Figma (Enter the password: valley)
Show, Don't Tell
By showing, not telling leadership the impact, I was able to get investment from the Chief Product Officer to hire an additional resource, a full-time UX Designer.
Additionally, I collaborated with product and engineering to estimate the frontend changes. We were able to show it would not impact the timeline to make the UX investment.
This early testing and design investment dramatically changed the outcome of the work.
Design
The team adopted a test, learn and iterate approach. The low-fidelity concepts evolved based on insights gained during the design research.
Finding One: Help People Get Started
What we heard in testing: people need clear information upfront about what they need to have ready so they can complete the application in one session.
Overall (60%) thought this screen was welcomed and people appreciated why it was there and the expectations it set.
Finding Two: Progress Indicator Placement
We learned 80% of users expected navigation and progress signals to be top center. This was also mobile friendly.
Where We Started
What We Delivered
Finding Three: Better Organize the Fields
We used content organization best practices to put all personal details together on one page.
Where We Started
What We Delivered
Finding Four: Tell People What is Next
- 50% expected an account to be instantly approved, 50% expected a review
- A confirmation or reference ID# was widely expected along with an email
- 50% of users wanted a timeline, and felt that asking for them to create an online banking username after an account was confusing
Where We Started
What We Delivered
Results
The team re-platformed and redesigned the account opening experience using operational and behavioral metrics to guide optimizations. The team also introduced new technologies that increased straight through processing of applications, decreasing costs and increasing conversions.
By the Numbers
After the first six months of the relaunched experience, success metrics were:
- Reduced annual customer care costs by $88,200.
- Reduced the number of manually-processed online banking applications by 50%.
- Increased account opening conversions by 10x.
- Reduced the length of time required to open an account online from 20 to 5 minutes.
- $10M+ in new deposits
Simple, Guided and Friendly
We created an experience that was simple, reducing the number of steps and simplifying the overall experience. It feels and looks visually lighter.
We created an experience that was guided, with the use of input field hints, progressive labelling and tool tips to help the customers complete tasks.
We created an experience that was friendly, using natural language to ensure the customers feel at ease and validations and expectations are met - at a human level.
Reflection
Trust and Safety
To open an account, you had to make an initial deposit. This was one of the largest drop off points in the conversion funnel. Funding with a technology partner, Plaid, was being pitched as a magic wand by the business due to the promise of instant funding of accounts.
More deposits was one of the key indicators of success.
When we conducted usability testing:
- Participants familiar with Plaid easily completed the step with no obstacles
- Participants unfamiliar with Plaid want to fully understand Plaid functionality and feel that their information is secure.
After launch, analytics showed us our hypothesis that Plaid could impact conversions was correct.
One of the first fast follows was to remove pain points created by Plaid.
The Team
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Hadassah Damien, Design Strategist
Ivy Chen, Design Operations
Caroline Phillips, Product Designer
Brandon Mosley, Product Designer
Michelle Ammiratti, UX Researcher
Joel Rosado, UX Researcher
Laura Cochran, Design Director (Player/Coach)
Let's Work Together
