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Product Designer
specialties in fintech, SaaS, CRM

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About

Finance of America Reverse was in need of a thorough site mapping and audit of their existing brand site. This audit report and resulting recommendations would be used to ensure a new site would be successful in serving a broad audience of financial advisors, partnering agencies, and individual consumers.

Goals

  • Compile and review user behavior metrics, heatmapping, and screen recordings to note user patterns and high-conversion pages
  • Provide recommendations for strengthening important flows and screens
  • Provide recommendations for shuttering low-performing and/or duplicative urls

With this report, the Growth Marketing team would have data and real user behavior to reference for making improvements to their sites.

Research

Competitive analysis involved reviewing offerings on competitors’ websites and social channels, as well as analyzing their user journeys.

Additionally, I had to research the best way to maintain compliance with New York’s Department of Financial Services and thus maintain license to do business online in that state. On this matter, I collaborated heavily with our internal legal department to confirm my recommendations would be permitted and defendable.

Some methodologies I used included implementing regular review of real-time screen recordings; heat map imaging; highest-clicks; bounce rate; time on page; and conversion rate. With the data properly compiled (via excluding staff IPs and filtering out spam), we got a much clearer picture of what our customers were looking for.

Learnings

As a result of the my audit and use of the above methodologies, I found that:

1. Users were only visiting a fraction of the site

We learned the most important pages that were part of the path to conversion for customers included product-specific pages and the home page. These pages, in addition to mandated legal content, only totaled perhaps ten crucial pages for the legacy site.

These metrics matched my assessment of multiple competitors’ New York-specific sites, most of whom appeared to simply maintain it so as to stay in compliance under their previously-approved business name and url.

Apart from these ten absolutely necessary pages, the more dynamic content such as blog articles and customer stories did not appear to be tied to traffic that led to conversion, even with repeat visitors.

To me, this suggested that while this content could still be valuable to consumers, a concerted effort was required to assess benefit and cost, including answering questions such as whether SEO and social media targeting could yield a reasonable increase, and whether our audience felt engaged and felt more affinity towards the brand.

2. Users were trying to learn about the product but were not always successful

Based on clicks and screen recordings, it was clear users were 1) clicking on anything that looked like a CTA or link and 2) clicking on anything with the word “reverse.” It appeared customers were trying to follow a clear path to understanding whether the product was suitable for them, but there did not seem to be one ideal path.

So, they were left to explore and educate themselves, which could lead to page bounces as they were perhaps more likely to gain understanding via a Google search (which would most likely take them to our competitors’ pages). This appeared to be an opportunity to improve on content offerings within each page and thereby reduce the complexity of flows and number of clicks.

One exceptional page without overtly educational copy was the Calculator. Up to this point the Calc page had been a user-friendly tool with no focus on conversion. But the page traffic, plus examples I provided of similar tools by industry peers, was enough to push the Marketing team to focus design and funneling efforts on the calculator page and tie it to an optional conversion path.

3. Users were confused by the copy, amplifying confusion with the product

This was such a facepalm moment. One of the main H1s on the homepage had copy that involved “Working on retirement.” Based on the clicks on this H1 (which led to nowhere) and the resulting contacts which requested work placement for retirees, the Marketing team realized the copy was not landing with the audience correctly. As a result, tv ads and social campaigns all had to be pivoted for more immediate clarity even before the user clicked through to the site.


My Recommendations

The above findings were presented to senior VPs and directors in a report with screenshots, visualized metrics, and a suggested site map.

Beyond the action items I laid out above, I recommended to the Comms and Marketing teams that they shutter most of the content pages on the legacy site that were not tied to conversion and link them instead to the new site. This was in line with what the Engineering team had recommended to me for both system maintenance and SEO purposes.

I also recommended drafting New York-specific content for the legacy site and all its associated campaigns. I theorized that in this way the user’s specific setting and context would be addressed and further reduce any customer confusion depending on their location.

The report was shared across teams and was approved by the involved directors as part of the site’s content strategy and maintence plan.