Alliant Credit Union, the 7th largest credit union in the US, wanted to position itself as a tech-forward credit union. In 2013 they came to us to modernize the brand, functionality, and messaging in order to appeal to the younger generation of credit union members who will form the backbone of their success in upcoming decades.
We developed a comprehensive strategic plan for the website via a thorough research project conducted before we ever put pen to paper. We surveyed the industry literature, conducted user interviews, developed user personas, analyzed web analytics, and reviewed the competitive landscape.
As a result of this research, we compiled a list of 9 primary goals that we listed in order of importance. These 9 goals guided every decision made throughout the project. Everyone involved, including UX designers, brand experts, copywriters, developers, and managers, was aligned to these goals.
To help guide the website design and development process from beginning to end we created a detailed discovery document of our findings .
Through our research we found the target demographic valued customer support much higher than we thought. We made it a point to focus the design and brand to being friendly and approachable without losing authority. Typography, graphic elements, and colors were all optimized to bring about a clean and approachable design aesthetic that was carried throughout the entire project.
In order to help give Alliant its own unique look and feel, we designed a series of custom icons and illustrations that are used throughout the site.
Mobile experience was just as important as desktop experience, so we also designed mobile views for the site, including a completely customized mobile homepage experience that is radically different than the desktop version.
The website search was integrated with an enterprise Google Search Appliance that Alliant owned. This helped us power extremely relevant results in site wide searches and in searches of the help center.
Finding ATMs is one of the primary uses on the website, and the old site offered a clunky list view search. We overhauled this completely with a map-based search that uses Google Maps and integrates with an API to plot all of the ATM and branch locations. This tool searches over 80,000 ATMs and it takes advantage of geolocation to show users the ATMs nearest them by default.
Alliant’s copy was full of technical jargon and it lacked any personality. As part of the brand refresh, we also wrote completely new copy. We coordinated with over 15 product owners within the company to gather the key facts and selling points of each product, and wrote copy that was compelling for the younger demographic we were targeting.
Since Alliant’s site discussed financial information, the copy needed to accommodate a lot of disclaimers and technical information to meet legal and ethical obligations. So we pursued a strategy where all technical information was footnoted and placed in the footer at the bottom of the page. The information is still easily accessible and findable, but we were able to write clear, concise copy that is much more readable for the average user.
Alliant was performing very well on search engines when users looked for Alliant specifically, but they were almost nowhere to be found when users searched other phrases related to credit unions. In order to expand the market awareness of Alliant and get them more customers, we conducted extensive keyword research to find good non-brand targets. These keywords were integrated during the copywriting process, and other search engine optimization techniques were implemented site wide.
An analysis 6 months later showed that organic search engine
visits went from 18.9% of all traffic to 30.7%.
That’s a 62% increase.