Union Bank & Trust

Helping Nebraska’s largest bank optimize their site experience

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Based in Nebraska, Union Bank & Trust’s (UBT) growth trajectory has them competing with larger, national financial institutions. My team at Elevated Third redesigned UBT’s marketing site in order to up its digital marketing game. Post-launch, UBT saw a significant increase in loan and deposit applications, as well as new business inquiries, that improved their bottom line and increased their community influence.

 

MY ROLE:

  • Lead designer — discovery, user research, information architecture, design

  • Led one other designer to execute project deliverables

  • Collaborated with lead developer to define and maintain requirements

 

What we achieved …

+61%

increase in loan applications

+9%

increase in deposit applications

+44%

increase in business inquiries

 
 

Understanding the site users

From secondary research, I determined that life-stages are a critical aspect in banking—customers have vastly different needs based on age and phase in life. I spoke to prospective and current customers to gather insights across these different life stages upon which UBT’s personas are built on. Unique aspects of their personas include a focus on local businesses, farming communities, college students, and family-oriented people who are younger than national average.

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Core insights gathered …

Convenience is King

The site needs to just “work.” Especially for transactional tasks (like paying a bill) or research tasks which the majority of users use digital tools to complete. 👑

 

Goal-driven youth

Young consumers 👶🏿 are extremely goal-driven but lack knowledge and experience with money. These users need guidance and advice on how to achieve their goals.

 
 

A Human Touch

Users crave a personal connection ☝🏽. A strong, positive relationship with the people managing their money is critical to driving loyalty to a specific bank.

 
 
 

Bank lingo is hard

People don’t want to feel overwhelmed or stupid and money 💸 can make them feel that way. Easy to understand language that helps users make sense of money is key.

 
 

Ditching the inside-out nav for outside-in

Based on the research, I stripped out the over-complicated org-based architecture and replaced it with a simplified structure with user-friendly language. Two primary paths are offered under each role-based dropdown: the first is a list of products for the tactical user who knows what they want; the second is based on key financial goals for those looking for guidance. The latter path provides guidance to users to help them achieve their financial goals at every stage of life.

 
 
 
 

Helping users find a location

Based on the research, I knew that finding a location would be an important feature to users. UBT had a map on their existing site that had a good base and I determined the need to add new features such as geolocation, map view modes, and well-defined logic for search result returns. On the front-end, I designed a minimal UI and increased the findability of hours and services by adding them directly to the map results.

 
 

An easier way to build pages

UBT’s site uses a modular component-based design system that I designed to allow site admins the flexibility to plan and build hundreds of page variations. The system defines the fields, functionality, and theming variations for every component. The lead developer and I developed admin-friendly (vs. developer speak) naming conventions for the system that maps to the site back-end. I worked with UBT throughout this process to ensure that they were comfortable with the new design system and developed a reference component guide to help them with content enablement long term.

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Foundational components

  • The base of each page. They are used most frequently

  • Highly modular with hundreds of layout possibilities

  • Example: Text or Media

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Presenter components

  • Complex, layered components that have distinct use cases

  • Position on-page may be adjusted, but should not be combined with any other component pieces.

  • Example: Tabs or Slider

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Explorer components

  • Reference content, usually in sets of 3-4, that users may “explore”

  • Pull in content based on specific conditions

  • Also allows manual curation by the content admin

  • Example: Employees or Resources

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Thanks for making it this far.

Want to check out some more of my stuff? Dig into how I built a learning delivery platform for the Human Capital Institute 🧠 Check out my exploration of machine learning through Predictive UX 🤖 See how I helped move Firewise USA® from a manual paper process to a low-touch, dynamic web app 🔥 or, learn more about me 👱🏻‍♀️🐈