Tag Archives: design

tinfoiling on the virtual human experience.

In a post I made a few days back, I tried to articulate some of the issues I’ve been thinking about our web site design to enhance the member/user experience.

Gene at tinfoiling left a comment in which he said:

The online experience seems to revolve around the person, their personal networks and being able to keep things the way they want to. Our products need to capture these elements.

I was intrigued, but his short comment on my site obviously didn’t capture the depth of what he was getting at, so I asked him to expand on his own site. Much to my delight he has.

Here’s Gene’s response on tinfoiling.

His theory, and I hope I do it justice is that web design as we’ve been dealing with it is a bit of a boondoggle, avoiding the key element of what the customer wants. And it goes back to our product design as well. A huge idea really, and I gotta admit, I’m still fully wrapping my head around it.

Colin, as usual, had a great comment:

Product – my take: forget about it. It comes last. Banks have been product centric for ever, and that doesn’t work when you get into experiential design.

A great conversation. I had no idea the doors I was opening when I started…

All things to all people

Thinking a lot, as I have lately, about the design of our website, I find myself focusing about three things. Obvious as they may be.

1> The vast majority of our site traffic is coming to do their online banking, so in a list of priorities the website is a relationship deepening tool first and foremost.

2> If we look at our member (credit union speak for customer) segments there are clear heavy users of our website and clear groups of members who don’t use online banking for their transactions. Based on the known priorities of the segments who use online banking, we can easily make the webiste sing for them, while bringing like-minded members along for the ride quite nicely.

3> I have stopped looking at my FI peers for inspiration. No offense to the other FI sites, but we’re competing against other e-tail experiences, not other FI sites. The kind of members who are core users of online banking are not comparing us to other sites in our vertical, but to the kinds of experiences they have shopping elsewhere on the web. Maybe not even just shopping, but getting entertainment and amusing themselves online.

Not rocket science, I know, but man do we have a whole lot of work ahead of us…