Research

Along with the study of existing data, we initiated vision discovery workshops with product owners and department heads of Swastika. Large scale interviews with existing & potential user base were also organized at 8 locations across India. The product owners were surprised to see the stark difference between their perception of what the users wanted & what the users actually wanted. This is not new to us! Research and data generally give eye-opening insights into user behavior.

Analyse

After the user research, we embarked on an analytical journey. This phase is most critical in defining a project’s success. The objective was to answer who would be categorized into primary, secondary & tertiary users, what their scenarios are, and why they would be interested in visiting Swastika’s website.

To understand how a new user would get persuaded to become a customer, we created ideal personas & dived deeper into their thought process. We carved out journeys & prepared flow charts of their emotions & actions. It is indeed very challenging to let go of our preconceived notions and think from someone else’s perspectives.

Furthermore, at the end of this exercise, we exactly knew what any new user would like to experience, to be sold entirely. In this case, it was trust, popularity, and ease of doing business.

Conceptualize

Every feature, task, and use case was taken into consideration when designing the wireframes. Things were getting more streamlined as we put our pens to paper. Wireframes are essential in UX design, and it gave a clear indication of what would be shown on every page of the website. It was essential to come up with meaningful ‘call to action’ buttons like Call now, Branch locator, etc., rather than ‘continue’ ‘next, etc. To prioritize user’s attention so that they spend time only on features that are most likely useful to them, the Progressive disclosure principle was applied. For example, no more than 4 options are provided in the header, which drills down to 3 sub-menus in the login and so on.

Wire flows were made to document user workflows & interactions.

Design

Turns out, people do judge a book by its cover!

And we wanted Swastika to be the bestseller. We designed the website with fonts that are easy to read and creates a feeling of trust among the readers. As a finance website, Swastika has wordings & concepts that are difficult to grasp for a not-so-mature audience. So these concepts were made easy-to-understand through illustrations & story-telling. Also, using the right colors & elements in the UI can improve brand recognition value. So a complete style guide was created centered around the logo & brand essence.