Today we launched our latest version of nscu.com. I have to admit that I’m very happy with the outcome. When I started work on this project earlier in the year. The goals were simple:
- Make it easier for people to complete key tasks
- Blend our personal and business offering (users were not self identifying with these self segments) and enable cross-sell to all sides of our service
- Enable us to continue to expand on the provision of a solutions-based, not product based approach to meeting member needs.
We modified the home page providing access to key tasks and introduced a compelling ‘widget’ as our primary communication area. The ease-of-use is remarkable and all available via one less click since we took out a whole level in the IA. The new section landing pages (Banking, etc.) we’re tweaked slightly as were the interior pages to provide more whitespace, better access to related links and reading. The contact us page even got a slight overhaul. Additionally, thanks to Dennis and his post about the length of your search query box — an optimized search query box.
I have a bunch more things I haven’t put live, so look for some surprises in the coming weeks.
Making our decisions based on the data (web analytics), rather than just gut is paying off. Over the past two years, incremental tweaks have reduced the reject rate on key pages substantially and overall site wide and continued refinements to the IA (information architecture) to elminate the number of clicks/steps required to complete tasks has visitors engaging with more content on the site.
A big thanks to Robbin Steif for listening and being full of opinion, Habanero for the IA, design and usability effort and the folks at CUCBC for pulling this all together.
8 replies on “Launch of the new North Shore Credit Union site”
Looks and works awesome, as would be expected. I love the fact that it’s not a complete re-design, rather a smart revision on top of the existing site.
But, may I ask why you chose to default to SSL, e.g. https, instead of http? Doesn’t that slow the site down in unnecessary places?
We did the same thing with redirecting to https. For us, it was required to put the login page for online banking on our homepage. But members seem to love it!
Thanks. We’ve always used SSL site-wide (about three years now). Haven’t seen much of a performance issue. What it does allow is the user to login and then move about the site OR come from anywhere in the site into online banking. We also leverage the login to pre-fill forms, etc.
Ah, I didn’t notice the login on what appears to be every page. That makes perfect sense then.
If only NSCU would open a credit union in Whitehorse, Yukon (a little out of their market, I know). I’d love to log in and see all of the other touches applied to online banking.
Looks very clean, and I like the analytic driven content.
Love love love the 950 px width!
And love the RSS even more.
Great job Scott! The new site looks great and I’m sure your users are going to love it.