BANKING│Meriwest Credit Union

Consistent UX from website to onboarding aims to reduce friction and increase conversions

The user experience team at a credit union can now demonstrate as much passion for their user journey as they have for their members thanks to a redesigned website and onboarding experience.

Marketing site and onboarding User Experience design for Credit Union

California, USA

UX audit
User testing and research
Website design
ClickModel® Prototype

Overview

Meriwest is a $2 billion credit union serving individuals and businesses in the Greater Bay Area of California and Pima County, Arizona. Founded in 1961 to serve the employees of IBM, Meriwest offers its members access to checking and savings accounts, consumer loans, small business loans and merchant services, and investment and insurance options from its branches, online, and via mobile.

In 2019, with the launch of a new website, the Meriwest team started looking at their digital model and overall user experience. They wanted to improve the onboarding journey and transition to digital so their prospective members would be able to join and open an account without ever having to come into a branch. Post COVID, they realized many of their members had adopted new habits that revolved around convenience and did not include conducting any of their banking at physical branches.

They selected a solution to enable a fully digital account opening and onboarding experience. Happy with its performance but realizing the user experience could be improved, they wanted to enrich the digital account opening experience in desktop and mobile-responsive format, with UX best practices to remove the friction and increase conversions.

At the same time, Meriwest performed extensive analytics and pinpointed user drop-off within the account opening workflow but was unable to uncover the reasons behind it and the specific points of friction within the experience. They were looking to conduct user testing to better understand, from a member perspective, exactly why they were dropping off and surface insights to inform a best-in-class experience.

Meriwest engaged Praxent to help them reduce friction and increase conversions by understanding why prospective members were dropping off before converting as well as improving the overall user experience to create the best possible user journey for their member community. Both the marketing and user experience teams searched for an outside partner with deep understanding of the banking industry who could help them objectively approach and solve their problem so they could focus on delighting their members.

The problem

Meriwest was in the midst of launching a full transformation to digital to accommodate the convenience-driven banking habits of its members post COVID. It was also hoping to better compete in the rapidly digitizing banking industry, increase new member adoption—especially among the younger Millennial and Gen Z market—and increase member retention.

Meriwest identified two obstacles to completing a full transition to online and mobile banking: 1) an inconsistent (and sub-par) user experience throughout the journey from the website to their digital account opening and onboarding solution, and 2) user drop-off within the account opening workflow that they knew was a result of friction but they couldn’t identify where the friction was occurring.

How we helped

Praxent’s expert design team worked closely with Meriwest to conduct a UX audit as well as user testing and research of members, non-members, and members who had dropped off. They then applied these learnings to designing a consistent customer journey that started with an engaging website experience for both current and prospective members and ended with a seamless onboarding process.

Our experience with Praxent is they became our extension. It wasn’t a vendor feel. They were an extension of our team. It was very collaborative. It was such a great collaborative experience. We all worked so well together.

Mary Shelton

Project Manager, User Experience

UX Audit

User testing and research

ClickModel® Prototype

UX audit

User research

Design

The outcomes

Meriwest received a redesigned user experience for its marketing website and onboarding platform thanks to four high-fidelity workflows and aligned UX/UI to drive consistency among Meriwest marketing and Terrafina catalog. Once the design is fully implemented, prospective and new members will be able to quickly and easily join, open an account, and compare products. They will be able to begin the onboarding process within two to three clicks, versus 7-10 clicks now.

The client is planning to move into phase two of its engagement with Praxent by the continuing implementation of its user experience across new online banking and mobile solutions.