Episode 64 -Identifying & Addressing User Experience Problems with Your Bank or Credit Union Website

Meredith Olmstead and Kristin Mock, of  FI GROW Solutions,  dive deep into the crux of enhancing user experience on digital platforms for banks and credit unions. Their insightful dialogue sheds light on common pitfalls and strategic maneuvers essential for any financial institution aiming to refine its digital branch.

Key Takeaways:

1. Monitor Key Indicators to Spot UX Issues: A high bounce rate and poor conversion rates are glaring indicators that your website's user experience (UX) may be lacking. 

2. Embrace the 'Three Click Rule' for Navigation: The digital journey on your website should be as frictionless as possible. Adhering to the 'three click rule'—ensuring that users can find any information or service within three clicks—is a good practice, albeit with flexibility for modern web navigation standards. 

3. Avoid Overloading Pages and Obscuring Products: Cluttering a single page with too many products or services can overwhelm users and dilute the SEO effectiveness. Each offering deserves its space to shine, particularly when catering to distinct customer segments. 

Transcription:

Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency and we work exclusively with banks and credit unions. I am here today with one of our inbound marketing strategists, Kristin Mock. Say hi, Kristin.

Kristin Mock:
Hi.

Meredith Olmstead:
So Kristin also runs the vast majority of our website projects for all of our bank or credit union clients. We've been doing a lot of work with clients on websites and we've been having some really meaningful conversations around strategy, and user experience and helping credit unions and banks identify when they may be missing the mark on their current website or what we call is their digital branch.

So I was like, maybe we ought to have a couple of podcasts where we really go over what it is that people need to be paying attention to when it comes to user experience in their digital space. So I said, let's hit record and let's talk about this. So if you're running the marketing department for a bank or credit union, I'm going to ask you this, Kristin. How do you know when you might be encountering or when users may be encountering some user experience problems on your website or on your digital branch?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah, there's a couple of numbers that you can really monitor to tell. A huge one is going to be bounce rate. If you can see the page that people are bouncing from, that's a great key that there's a problem on that page ultimately, conversion rates. If you're not seeing your conversion funnel perform the way you'd like it to, probably having some user experience issues.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So when we say user experience though, I'm thinking of okay, do you have people who are coming to your website who are having success in being able to find what they're looking for without somebody at your bank or credit union having to guide them through the digital experience.

So if you have a lot of times people calling and trying to find something on your website and they can't find it, that can be also an indication of an issue. Or if people are entering really simple questions into your chat over and over or into your contact us forms over and over. I can't find X, Y, or Z, and it could be something simple like I can't find your routing number or how do I get in touch with your mortgage department? Or something like that where if you've seen a number of those kinds of questions coming in, you can say, why are they not able to answer this question on their own? That is an indication of a user experience problem. Correct?

Kristin Mock:
Absolutely. Or if you have site search enabled and you see what people are searching for and it's something simple that should just be in your menu.

Meredith Olmstead:
Okay, bounce rates, yes. Site search. You could even bring in members or customers and have them sit down and give them a pretty quick little, give them 25 bucks for their time or gift card to something. Give them three scenarios of what they're trying to find without any help at all on your website and have them try to navigate without your help. I mean, you could have friends and family do that. You have five or seven different people test the website. See how easy is it for me to figure out how to enroll in online banking or how to sign up for bill pay or something along those lines, whatever it might be. Or find out the information in order to pay my mortgage online. All those different kinds of things. See if people can find that information easily.

So that's the first thing. So if you're having any of those issues and you feel like, oh, you know what? I may have some user experience issues. Where should they start? I know you mentioned something about three clicks and I was like, huh, okay, that sounds interesting and that's maybe an easy place to start. So tell me a little bit about what you mean by in terms of ease of navigation, three clicks or less. What is that?

Kristin Mock:
So most people who have experience doing any sort of web design are going to have heard of the three click rule. It's kind of came around around the time of the internet, around the time of people making these initial websites that whatever destination someone is looking for, wherever a user's trying to get, it should never be more than three clicks away. The rule's a little bit antiquated. Internet speeds are a little faster and we've got a lot more options than we did at the beginning, but it's honestly still not a bad rule of thumb. If you're clicking 10, 15 times to get to a destination, that's pretty rough. But yeah, people are definitely going to abandon their journey if they can't find what they're looking for. So using that as a basic rule of thumb is still pretty.-

Meredith Olmstead:
Maybe it's not three clicks, maybe it's four at the most or five, but you don't want people to have to click eight times to find something that's pretty basic and something they're looking for.

So what are some of the problems that you're seeing most commonly? I know that you say in order to try to avoid making things be a couple of steps away, what are mistakes that you're seeing financial institutions making on their websites?

Kristin Mock:
So the biggest one we see is people putting too many products on a single page. Someone will say, okay, so if I'm trying to follow this three click rule, or if I'm trying to limit how many website pages I am creating or writing content for, whatever the reason, we're seeing people say, I want to put every mortgage product that we offer on a single page. Or every consumer loan that we offer on a single page, and that is never going to be the best for your user or for SEO.

Meredith Olmstead:
I have seen even on some websites that we've launched and some digital branches we've launched in the last couple of years, we will do sometimes where you'll see like, okay, they might have four different checking accounts at an institution that we might do a comparison chart of on their checking page. That's something that, from a user experience perspective, you can justify because you want people to be able to side by side compare features of a very similar product or service. But what's an example of a group of products that you would never want to put on the same page?

Kristin Mock:
So the biggest one that we see people doing is recreational loans. If they offer an RV loan, an ATV loan, a boat loan, those are very different audiences. I'm not in the market for more than one of those at a time. So keeping those products together is a really big mistake.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, it's funny too because we've seen where Arizona financial institutions will gain a lot of traction around certain times of the year for ATV or recreational vehicle loans and boat loans. If you were trying to put that all in one place, it wouldn't make any sense at all. Whereas boat loans, we've seen even in Texas certain times of the year around in certain geographical areas, boat loans can be in very high demand. So you want to make sure you can promote those pages and get that search value for those specific search terms.

Okay. So not putting too much content on any one page is really important for user experience. You said something too, that I thought was interesting about don't hide your products and services. That's really funny. So how do you see sometimes people who come to us hiding stuff by mistake?

Kristin Mock:
Sometimes it's by mistake and sometimes it's a little intentional. If you have a product that maybe doesn't get you the best margin or you're not really trying to push that product, we see a lot of financial institutions try to basically bury that product. Whether that means it's at the very bottom of some lengthy page or there's maybe no direct menu link. They don't even put the product in their menu, even if that website page exists. Maybe they put nothing about that product on their website at all. But the idea is that they don't want to advertise that they have that product, and that's really not good for user experience or SEO once again. If you offer it, it should be out there.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. I actually, too, sometimes think it creeps up on people. When you've had a website around for two and three years and your marketing department has... Maybe there's been a couple of new products added and they got added to a sub page, but they never got added to the top menus or the parent menus on the site structure. So then you'll go and you'll look at the main menus and you'll see, okay, wait, there's nowhere here for this whatever kind of personal loan maybe that they've created for a certain type of need. So it's buried on the personal loan page. But then if somebody were to come to the site and be like, oh, I wonder if they have a plastic surgery loan or something specific like that, and there's no top line menu item, they may assume that you don't have it.

Okay. So the biggest takeaway then, if we're talking about trying to understand if you're having, how to identify user experience problems and then really how to address them, what would be your main suggestions for people?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah, I mean, definitely look at your data and talk to your users. That's how you're going to really identify where those pain points are and in resolving them, there's a lot of different ways to resolve depending on the problem. But what we're talking about today is that navigation and really just making sure you clean up a very clear journey for your users that they can follow very simply when they need to get to a certain product or service.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. I also think too, and we'll talk about this when we talk about conversions, but it's really important to identify what does success look like on your various pages? That's where I get... You can really quickly kind of assess, okay, if I go to a page and there's a lot of useful information, a lot of information, and there's no next step, there's no clear next step, there's no clear this is what success looks like. Whoever takes in all that information, what do you want that user to do with that information? There has to be very clear instructions, a very clear next step. A next button to click, or a form to submit, or something along those lines. So absolutely, I think it's important to focus on that user experience, how it relates to the buying journey, and you're going to want to do that before you worry about how many pages you have on your website in terms of page count.

Because honestly, at the end of it, you may end up with a few more pages, and maybe they're a little shorter, but they're more concise and clear and get that user to where they need to go in order to help them make that next step. Take the next step on their buying journey.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kristin. We'll continue these conversations around websites and how to build better digital branches. But in the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about our website services or any of our other products or services or how we're helping banks and credit unions, please feel free to visit us at FIGROW.com. We have lots of other great podcasts, blogs and case studies, and otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.