Whilst working for Virgin Money as a UX designer, I was tasked with redesigning the pre-apply page of the credit card journey. By using Google Analytics we had noticed a significant drop off in users when they got to this page. Given that every credit card we sold relied on this page, improving the issues Analytics had uncovered would be extremely beneficial to the business.

Working with our user researcher, we used user interviews to dig to the root of the problem and uncover the pain points of our customers. We aimed to get a deeper understanding of why our users we dropping off in such big numbers once they got to this page.

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User Research

We took the current design out to some of our credit card customers. I observed the user interviews which we’re moderated by our team’s User Researcher and noted down the insights we discovered on post it notes.

After the interviews had been completed I held a group analysis session with the rest of our scrums team. Here we watched the recordings and created an affinity map were we agreed as a team about what patterns and insights we all saw occurring during the research.

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What we discovered

• Too much content on the page - users were ignoring the majority of the content
• Product rates were hard to understand
• Trust is extremely important to credit card customers - small print eroded this
• Users don’t want us to waste their time - they only want to read about products they are eligible for

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The redesign

With a deeper understanding of the problems that we’re occuring on our pre-apply page, I set about coming up with some new concepts for the page that would tackle the issues we found and hopefully solve these problems for our users.

Heres are some of the changes I brought into the redesigns and how they each tried to address a key user need we had uncovered in our research.

• Introduce a large image of the product at the top of the page with the Virgin. Trust was a big issue with our users so letting them know they had arrived at the right place helped build that trust up right at the top of the page.
• Pre-apply at the top of the page lets users know whether they are eligible - users told us they didn’t want to waste time reading an entire page just to find out they aren’t eligible for this card. Introducing this at the top reassured users that they can get this product before continuing further down the page.
• Put the rates and fees into easy to read, conversational language. Our rates were presented in a hard to read format. By rewriting them into a more human format we aimed to make it easier to understand what you were getting from this product.
• Highlight T&C’s instead of ‘hiding’ with small print - We found users would not read the small print but thought the way it was present made them feel like we we’re hiding something from them. Instead of hiding T&C’s away with small fonts, I highlighted them to make sure users knew what they we’re signing up for.
• Calculator lets users understand the real cost this product would be to them - Our users told us they would almost always go away and figure out the real cost to them. By introducing a calculator to the page, users could completed this task effortlessly without needing to leave the pre-apply page

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We also found our users would skip over a lot of the content found on the pre-apply page. After digging deeper they told us that the content focused on what you need to be eligible for the product is irrelevant to users that are just browsing and haven’t committed to applying yet.

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To solve this I split the content out over two pages. This meant the first page became more focused and showed the information relevant to users that are just browsing and when they felt ready to apply, they would they see the important information about eligibility when they needed to. This meant we could show less information at once, so not to overwhelm the user and also show them the right information at the right time.

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After completing the redesign we went back to our users and I worked with our User Researcher to learn insights about how the new designs sat with them.

What we discovered

• Overall tested well with none of the previous problems being mentioned
• Usability issues were found in the calculator - however, all participants found it useful to their decision making process
• Pre-approved message scared some users - they thought 24hrs was trying to force them to apply now or lose it

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Overall this was a great success as the issues and insights found in the second round of testing brought up much smaller issues with the sight and none of the previous issues we’re brought up again. This gave us confidence that the redesign would improve the problems found on the pre-apply page and that we were ready to build the page to put live on our site