Menu
Creditfix – the UK’s largest debt solutions provider with more than 151,000 customers – is an ambitious brand with plans to help even more people become debt free. The problem is, their brand website was not turning traffic into leads the way they needed it to.
I set out to solve this problem by redesigning the website in such a way that it became accessible, credible, findable, usable and useful to their target audience.
We studied user behaviour on Hot Jar recordings, looking at heat maps and clicks. It was clear that less than 25% of users were travelling beyond the second section of the site. This meant they were missing vital information about how Creditfix can help, and what’s involved in the debt management process.
I analysed the data, looking at various demographics, including gender, age, employment status, marital status, number of dependents and average debt levels. What I discovered is that the only significant difference between demographics came with age groups.
Rather than create personas, it felt more appropriate to look at ‘debt years’. I broke down the age groups and found the most common age ranges to require debt help.
These participants were not existing customers but identified in screening that they were worried about their debt.
I conducted user observation sessions with each of them, watching as they interacted and talked me through using the Creditfix website. The feedback provided an intriguing breakthrough that no form of quantitative research had been able to.
63% of users said they felt negative about the red brand colour, associating it with debt letters from creditors.
75% were confused by ‘Help with Debt’ and ‘Debt Solutions’ navigation structure, unable to tell a difference between them.
63% said they wouldn’t fill the contact form in at the end of the lead funnel, as it wasn’t clear what happens next.
I took the existing logo and recreated it, with a cleaner typeface and more positive colour – emphasising the ‘fix’. In this design, I’d retained the tick within a circle – replacing the circle with the letter ‘C’, and just improved the visual balance of the logo.
Before overhauling the entire brand, I decided to add the new logo and create a colour palette to test on users as part of the redesign, simply to gauge a reaction.
The old logo lacked a visual balance and the colour was negatively received by users, who associated red with debt letters and collection agencies.
I replaced the red with a calming green shade, and simplified the design to make it flatter and more visually balanced.
The developers collaborated with me at this stage, so that we could focus on possibilities as well as limitations.
Following internal sign-off on the wireframes, I was able to flesh them out to clickable prototypes, again using Adobe XD, making them suitable for usability testing.
This was done so that we could analyse data based on region, as well as age group.
Each city included six sessions involving two users from the main three age groups – one male, one female – so that we had eight sessions per group by the end of the week.
100% of users preferred the green palette to the red one when shown both at the beginning of the session.
100% of users understood within 5 seconds what the website offered and what it was about. They were also able to identify how Creditfix can help them.
On average, it took users less than 4 seconds to find whatever we asked them to find on a page or the site itself.
The percentage of users who completed the lead generation questionnaire increased from 75% to 88%.
The percentage of people who said they would give their details or proceed to the next stage increased from 37% to 71%.
The average score that users gave for being able to find what they were looking for was 9.2 out of 10.
This project, like most, is ongoing and iterative. While the results are initially positive, the aim is to improve upon them further.
From my own perspective, I’m proud to have overhauled a website to include a much better user experience, both in terms of accessibility and findability. We were also able to add credibility to the site through transparency, which it lacked previously.
Email norriejhansen@gmail.com and introduce
yourself or your project. I look forward to it.