Project Overview

ING DIRECT puts customer experience at the centre by developing a responsive banking website that strives to eliminate customer pain points, improves a customer’s self-service capability, employs best practice online retailing while adding a little fun along the way.

Our previous website was cluttered, busy, confusing and didn’t allow customers to achieve desired goals in an easy and enjoyable way. This was not aligned to our Brand. Being a direct bank, our website is our front door for potential and existing customers so it’s crucial for us to deliver a differentiated digital experience. We built the new website from scratch, involving our customers from the outset, understanding motivations and needs before going through an in-depth iterative design and build phase.

Organisation

ING DIRECT

Team

The new ING DIRECT website was managed, researched and designed in-house and built by Lash Creative.

Project Brief

Digital experience isn't a single project, nor is it a single technology. Rather, it's an ongoing, strategic direction. The brief was to design a site that met key principles around reinforcing who we are as a brand, providing an excellent customer experience by removing customer pain points, implementing online retailing best practice to drive banking product sales, improving online self-service, ensuring the accessibility across devices as well as being modular and reusable.

We delivered on this by developing a clear, easy-to-use and enjoyable website providing language that is jargon-free, simple and focused on benefits. Appropriateness to the device or the context in which it is used is supported by developing template driven architecture with 3 breakpoints. The intuitive design assists the customer buying cycle, by addressing their needs and questions up-front, which has increased overall product conversions by 17%.

Project Innovation/Need

The innovation in the new site is in its design. The design had to meet a number of goals and, in a very intuitive way, delivers on this. The website is:

Anticipatory - allows for dynamic presentation of relevant information and content based on user need, behaviour and motivation on the site (driven by a combination of web analytics and customer data).

Contextual- employs the principle of progressive disclosure and thereby allowing all relevant content to be made available to the user when needed and in the right context without having to overwhelm their experience.

Responsive - allows the user to have a consistent and device- appropriate experience (Desktop, Tablet, or Mobile phone).

Aside from the above, the site is very easy to read, has large font, lots of white space, clear, and simple iconography and images. This is a shift away from what is normally expected from a bank but reinforces who we are as a Brand.

Design Challenge

The biggest design challenge for the project was that there were a number of objectives that had to be met while ensuring that the site remained simple, clear and easy-to-use -- putting a smile on the customer's face while driving business growth.

We stripped out lots of irrelevant content or presented it through progressive disclosure. We focused on ensuring the scrolling work well and how the top navigation bar minimises but is still available as you scroll. Visual cues let users know if there is further content. Keeping the structure across the pages consistent ensured that users know what to expect. Mega-menus meant the site has a very flat hierarchy so users are never a few clicks away from the information they want.

By using a modular design, we developed certain spaces on each page that present content tailored to what we know about the visitor offering digital experiences that are dynamic and targeted.

For us it was the attention to detail and the sum of all the little things that allowed us to exceed the goals of the website.

User Experience

Since the website launched in March 2014, the customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with feedback like “Brilliant. I am convinced the little animations only work when I look at them for a wink. So cool for a bank...ha ha. You are my heroes. Thanks ING for being outside the square.”, “very nice, informative but not too busy making it easy to navigate”, “love it”, “A million times better!”

Not only are visitors to our site happy, this has led to tangible business benefits like overall visits to the website grew by 20% and by 72% to the product pages which has led to an increase in overall product conversions by 17%. The bounce rate for prospects has decreased by 24%. We have had a reduction in emails by one-third as information is now easier to find and understand. Given this the new website has exceeded all expectations!