Bank Rewards Site Redesign

Background 

A long-term client contracted our team for a fully accessible, mobile-first redesign of their dated e-commerce rewards site.

The project included all major pages, but also page variations and flows for multiple banking products - each with their own branding and special functionality.

To further complicate the project, the site had to be upgraded in two phases. Phase 1 would be using an existing backend while phase two involved migration to a new platform which offered increased catalog complexity and platform personalization capabilities.

Discovery

Discovery took place in Minneapolis via in-person work sessions at the client’s headquarters.

Sessions included my team, developers and systems architects from Epsilon (my company), and the client’s leadership team for rewards redemption. Midway through our second week developers from the client’s catalog and fulfillment provider joined us as well.

Through the long days of a Minneapolis bomb cyclone we hammered out the details of how to make the complex layers of the backend invisible to users of a streamlined front end. This whiteboard was one of many brought back to the hotel on my phone.

Design

To overhaul the information architecture I needed to:

• consolidate the site map

• improve the user flows

• lay out a new architecture

The site would need to accommodate unique experiences for 10 different lines of business, each with a different set of users goals, client priorities, and costs of redemption.

However, the design also needed to be standardized in a way which kept development costs to a minimum.

To the right is the existing site map, and below it is the revision I developed to meet these goals.

In order to make common redemptions easy while still showcasing the unique value of each line of business I proposed a new information architecture.

I placed line-of-business-specific activities in their own menu, which let me customize for each product while keeping the same hierarchical structure to keep site navigation consistent between products.

I was also able to limit navigation to 7-or-less items in the main nav with a hierarchy no more than 4 layers deep. The new hierarchy was more comprehensible for users, and instantly familiar to those using multiple bank products.

The site’s limited content creation staff was frequently overwhelmed, so to ease site maintenance I employed a modular design where content and components can be shared effortlessly between the various product lines.

On the home page, redemption types for a given product are placed in ranked order moving down the page. Common and high-value redemptions receive the most attention, while product partners are still given pride of place above the fold.

The client loved the wireframes, so we moved forward to deliver full visual comps, an interactive prototype, and two rounds of user testing before building and launching the new site.

User Testing

This is the result of a long planning session where we worked out a detailed user testing plan. We landed on a combined approach utilizing usertesting.com’s services, the bank’s in-house testing lab, and Epsilon’s analysis and updating.

Overall responses to the redesign were positive, often citing an intuitive and easy to navigate structure, but there was naturally constructive feedback to incorporate.

The new site launched last year and continues to garner favorable feedback from the client and their users.