Grow Banking Product with UX

Share Certificate Lifecycle Refresh

86%

Completion rate growth

40%

Account opening growth

$150M

Deposit growth

57%

Auto-renew flag growth

Background

As one of the largest credit unions in the US, Alliant’s Share Certificate has always been the most popular product among its members.

However, no matter it’s opening a new Certificate account or renewing an existing one, the experiences on Alliant website were both a nightmare due to feature creep.

Therefore, there are two goals in my redesign:

Grow deposits by improving the Certificate opening flow.
Grow Certificate renewal rate by improving the maturity experience.

In this article, I will articulate how I approached these two goals.

Scope

CD Lifecycle for both Web and Mobile App

Timeline

8 Months

Core Team

Hugo Hsiao | UX Designer
Tim Wong | Product Owner
Khan Muhammad | Web Engineer
Tabish Ansari | Mobile Engineer

2 opportunities for growing deposit

1. Completion rate | 43% → 80%

The original opening flow was more than 10 yr old and without any UX foundation. How to make it effortless to open a CD became my first dish immediately.

Convincing people that less is more has become the biggest challenge at this point.

Business Owner:

Let’s introduce a new feature for members to open several CDs at once.

UX: Is that really a need?

Only Average 1.9 CDs per member

UX: The CD opening flow completion rate is only 43%, seems some room to improve.

Let’s redesign the opening flow and see if we can grow the amount of monthly opening.

This is Strategy

Over the years, feature creep gone wild,

Subtraction

became the first challenge I met while redesigning the flow.

And among all the decisions to simplify the opening process,

removing the "Maturity Option" from the flow is the toughest.

The CD will default to Auto-renew after the member opens it. Although they can change the maturity option to “close the Cert and transfer funds” later, it’s still a very sneaky move to me. Felt I betrayed the users whom I was supposed to speak for. Yet, it helps the business. Our Auto-Renew Flag shows a dramatic increase:

35.5% → 73.8%

One of the challenges but my favorite parts of this project is there’s

No Reference

The existing flow has no UX foundation. And it’s the very first time for Alliant to design a modern banking product opening process.

What does the look and feel should be? How do I present options and information? Most importantly,

what’s the best practice of the UX for a banking product opening process?

Some answers come out quickly: Simple, hierarchy, pre-populated fields..etc. What about the flow? My guts told me Wizard flow it is. It’s a trend to apply Wizard flow to form applications. It helps users to focus on one question at a time, preventing chances of being overwhelming and confusing.

Then the testing result showed I was totally wrong. Users prefer a one-page experience. 62.5% of testers said one-page experience is easier to read, more in control and, interestingly, faster. Which they were totally wrong and didn’t realize it.

One-page: 1m 50s
Wizard: 1m 22s

07

Curiosity

Enabling external funding

08

Challenge 5: Biggest fail

Been asked for solution during
meeting

09

Define the Goal

What if the members don’t have enough money in their Alliant accounts?
- We need to add an External funding feature -> Result: External Deposit
What if members missed the renew notification email?
- We need to notify them in the app/website
which unmet needs represent the best opportunities for growth?

10

Result
The Data

Ch. 1 Old version is outdated

Feature creep gone wild

As one of the largest credit unions in the United States, Alliant Credit Union has more than 850,000 members in 2024, a 55% increase over 2020.

Its online banking (OLB) website - designed more than 10 years ago, struggled to scale alongside the growth of the company. Fundamental usability was challenged. Features and information competed for focus.

Opening a CD account is frustrating.

CH2.

My Role

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.