sCOTIA Advice+

Redesigning the Advice+ homepage to educate customers wherever they are on their financial journey

Overview

Advice+ is a financial advice service that Scotiabank offers to its personal banking clientele

Advice+ offers free resources such as articles, podcasts and quizzes to empower new and existing customers seeking financial advice for various areas of their lives e.g.; learning the basics of investing or planning for milestones like having a baby.

Stakeholders wanted to redesign the homepage to improve content discoverability and engagement.

Problem Definition

The previous Advice+ homepage felt overwhelming, with many articles thrown at clients with no clear narrative

As I joined the team after the kick-off meeting, I met with my design manager to get the background of the project and learn about the project goals, as well as the key stakeholders and the design and content team. To establish a baseline for metrics, I reviewed an April 2024 performance report of the Advice+ homepage. After reading the report, I audited the homepage to see what was currently working, identify gaps in the existing user experience, and familiarize myself with the design system.

During the audit, I noticed the following:

1.Misleading hero banner copy

The current copy in the hero banner didn’t mention the name of the page or provide an overview of its purpose. Instead, it featured copy promoting a campaign targeting senior clients with a primary call-to-action (CTA) that took users to Scotia’s Senior Resource Center.

2. Missed opportunities for content engagement

Instead of showing featured articles, the page included a subtle banner that redirected to the Advice+ featured article page. In my opinion, this was a missed opportunity to create engagement with visitors and give them a structured overview of the content we have to offer.

3. Lacking of filtering and search capabilities

There were no search and filter capabilities to help readers organize and sort through content to quickly find what they wanted.

4. Cognitive overload with articles

There were too many articles on the page which created an overwhelming experience, especially for users browsing on mobile, where the majority of users (68%) access the page.

5. No cross-sells of financial products that could help users on financial journey

The bottom sections of the page contained a couple of repetitive sections e.g. “3 ways to learn about money” and “Everything you need to know about your financial future”. This felt like another missed opportunity to include links to additional resources or a product cross-sell section that could help clients achieve real progress.

Competitor analysis

Analyzing Canadian and American competitors to identify design patterns to boost engagement

I reviewed 6 competitors to understand the following:

• How do competing FIs structure their content?

• How can users search and filter content?

• What keywords appeared the most often?

• What were their primary CTAs? Where did those appear in the experience?

• What concepts and topics FIs choose to explore?

• What cross-sell opportunities were shown on the page, if any?

• What components/design patterns did they use to boost engagement? How ‘sticky’ was the page overall?

One of the competitors that I looked at in-depth was RBC’s Money Matters. I liked how they highlighted the search functionality at the top of the page, giving users the flexibility to immediately find articles related to the topics they cared the most about. I also liked using their quiz component. Unlike Scotia’s quiz component, RBC’s showed users how their answers ranked against others. I think it was a smart and simple way to introduce elements of competition and gamification - making the component more engaging.

Problem sTATEMENT & INITITAL UX STRATEGY

How might we create opportunities for personalization and make an engaging experience for customers looking for financial advice while highlighting the various Advice+ tools and resources?

Narrative 2 - Choose your adventure

Customer likes to browse and explore relevant topics to see a high-level view of the content that Advice+ has to offer.

Once I felt comfortable with my low-fidelity wireframes, I set up some coworking sessions with the content designer to discuss my ideas for the page. I also wanted to understand and align a content strategy in terms of concepts to prioritize on the page, appropriate CTAs to use and best placement, and the top keywords for the page.

UX/UI Design

Sharing designs recommendations with stakeholders

After meeting with the content designer, I decided to focus on the second-page narrative I developed. Using components from Scotia’s existing design system, I created a layout that would allow users to explore Advice+ content in a way that wouldn’t cause cognitive load.

I scheduled a design walkthrough with the design and content team as well as the marketing and business stakeholders to review my designs and share the following recommendations:

3. Including a section for trending topics

As we weren’t able to implement robust search functionality due to technical constraints, having a trending topic section helps to highlight buried content simply. Business and marketing stakeholders would also have the option to change the order and visibility of the topics based on analytic data e.g. which topics are getting the most traffic and engagement. Due to the limited timeline and lack of resources, I wasn’t able to engage the user research or personalization teams, however, this was a section I wanted to research further through an a/b test.

5. Having an evergreen section for fraud content

This section features security and fraud-related content to empower users, especially seniors, on how they could better protect their finances. In my previous role at BMO, I’d seen statistics and reports that showed security and fraud as big concerns among banking customers.

6. Closing out the page with 3 different CTAs

For clients who were ready to be proactive about their financial health.

Design Feedback

Incorporating stakeholder feedback and reviewing the accessibility of the design

Following the design walkthrough, the feedback from the business line was mainly around choosing more neutral colours, streamlining the trending topic section and adding more visual interest. There was also feedback to explore using carousels like RBC to display the trending topics.

I took in the other feedback but pushed back on the carousel for the following reasons:

1. It hurts discoverability and adds unnecessary friction for users who want to see an overview of all the possible options.

2. While carousels can help display content like product features and reviews or an image gallery, they tend to have low-click through rates when the content is unrelated or not compelling (source)

As a compromise, I reduced the number of trending topics to 10 items that received the most user traffic overall - after reaching out to the senior experience manager to pull the related analytic data. I designed the section to feature 5 topics on default with the remaining 5 hidden under a “Show more” button, with iconography for visual interest.

Once I felt the design was in a stable place, I scheduled an accessibility review with the Accessibility SME, content designer and digital experience manager to review the headline hierarchy, tab order and if any components needed to be reworked to improve the accessibility of the page.

Outcome

The Advice+ homepage was launched on Dec 4th 2024 to improve user engagement, content discoverability and wayfinding. Since launch, the page has seen a 54% increase in content engagement.

Thank-you for reading!

Wanna learn more about this project? Let’s chat

You can reach me at: kerleajoseph@gmail.com