Modern Account Application Process

We set out to modernize and optimize the bank account application process for a reputable Aussie bank

See Live Website

Role

UI/UX

Team

Pivotal Agency

Date

2021

The Client

Southern Cross Credit Union (SCCU) are a small Australian bank with personality. They focus on Home Loans and personal banking and have a bunch of community programs to help give back. They wanted to modernize their old-school account registration process. Being an existing client, they approached us to overhaul this process for them.

Check out their website

The Brief

The brief was to take the current PDF registration form and turn it into an interactive online application form, designed for mobile first. With this, we set out to break the form into small, manageable steps that would give feedback and make the user feel rewarded for getting through the process. The clients’ internal development team would handle the build of the new application form, so we just needed to design some concepts.

We worked with SCCU to get an idea of what information needed to be collected at each step. With that, we started designing the desktop and mobile concepts.

THE PROCESS

Starting off on the right foot

We knew we would need to make it super clear what the user would need and how to fill out the form, so we decided that the first step would serve this purpose, allowing the customer to select their account type while also clearly detailing the requirements. The second step would be the most important, capturing the customers details.

THE PROCESS

Easy as 1, 2, 3... 4... 5?

We had to make verifying the customers identity part of the process, but we wanted to make it as easy on them as possible. We decided that we would offer the 2 simplest options for verification, with 3 easy fields for each. The initial plan was to only have these 3 steps, with the 4th page being a confirmation/thank you page. However, after analysing the application process from a bunch of competitors for bank accounts and loan applications, we realised that we were missing the vital “confirm that everything is correct” step. We didn’t want to make this the typical boring “here is a bunch of things to sign” step, so we made the confirmation implicit and instead offered the customer the ability to return to and edit their responses on any of the steps. We slotted that in as a 4th step and pushed the thank you page to number 5.

The Little Details

We used large toggle buttons in place of radio buttons, and open-air input fields with plenty of white space to make the process feel more friendly and simple. To top this off, we designed a set of custom icons to add a touch of personality. While the concepts would be static images, the intention was that subtle feedback animations and smooth ajax loading would be used to make the process even more intuitive and rewarding. Of course, that would be at the discretion of their internal dev team.