How I re-imagined the Small Business digital journey

The successful launch of Scotiabank.com brought forth a slew of new and interesting challenges in regards to this business oriented redesign. A shift in thinking was needed in order to better understand business customers and their needs.

The Challenge

Business owners value their time. More often than not, they do not have resources or patience to scour websites for information. They often rely on phone calls and face to face interactions. While this is not an accurate description of all business owners, we found this to be a trend with those we spoke with in regards to the account offerings at Scotiabank.

With over 50 customer facing products, it was almost impossible to find the right product on the website, and clients had to rely on branch visits and the retail advisor line to connect them to the right person.

Call centres were not properly trained for these types of requests and often times transferred clients to different departments several times per call. This constant movement was both unprofessional and would introduce long wait times, friction and stress, ultimately leading potential customers to choose a competitors offerings.

With these pain points identified and addressed, we set to work on our solution.

The solution

Following a comprehensive analysis of our metrics and user data, we examined how current customers interacted with our website and cross-referenced these insights with feedback gathered from direct conversations with business account holders.

Creating personas based on real business owners

We spoke to and interviewed over 15 real business owners ranging from small to midsize to large scale business. Funnily enough, I asked early on in my research phase what exactly a small business comprised of, and the industry had not agreed on a standard. We created our own formulation based on business size, profits and if they had expanded outside their original location.

We eventually netted out on three core pillars for small business, and built the following personas.

With journey maps and personas firmly established, we refined our strategy to develop a tailored guide designed to help new customers discover the ideal account for their needs. Additionally, a content redesign and restructuring were identified as impactful steps to enhance the experience for our existing customers.

Building a foundation

During my research, I discovered a specialized bank account tailored for Canada’s diverse grain farmers, highlighting the depth of Scotiabank’s offerings at the time.

We strategically positioned the guide front and center, replacing the usual promotions and marketing banners. New customers would answer a few simple questions, resulting in a personalized account recommendation and detailed signup steps to ensure a smooth on-boarding experience.

User Testing

User testing is one of my favourite exercises in product design. There is no better feeling than watching your designs being scrutinized—sometimes confirming your expectations, other times challenging them. With the help of the user-testing team, we built test cases for our flows and put them in-front of real business owners.

Learning from these sessions is essential to determine if what you’ve created works for thousands of people. There is never a one size fits all solution, so knowing how to navigate feedback is crucial in launching an effective product.

After extensive testing and feedback sessions, we validated our design decisions, made changes, retested and finally set our sights on final designs and development.

A fresh coat of paint

Alongside the new guide, we also took the time to better organize the information architecture into more familiar groups. I conducted card sorting exercises with business owners and groups within the bank to better sort the content into meaningful categories that suited users rather than business lines.

This reorganization of content simplified the journey and made our new guide faster to develop.

Finally, with a new brand freshly launched brand months prior, this was the perfect opportunity bring the small business look and feel into the modern day. This was made easy since we had recently built out our design system in Figma and the AEM back-end, so developers could work more efficiently and with less design QA.

Impact & Conclusion

With an accelerated development cycle, we launched the redesign in 6 months to great success. With redefined information architecture, accurate personas, improved user-flows, and a fresh coat of paint, we saw upticks in account creation via the website and a downward trend of call centre cold calls.

The guide received positive feedback for helping potential customers uncover accounts without having to spend time speaking with 2-3 representatives.