How I doubled a bank’s conversion rate.
How an industry-leading software designer used psychology, neuroscience and a little inspiration from literature to help double HSBC’s online applications for financial products.
Rory Watts is a user experience (UX) designer. In his 15 year tech career, he consulted for major global brands including Nike, Ocado, TUI Travel and more. By practising deep focus on what other people wanted, needed and experienced, he was able to achieve unique results for HSBC; redesigning the experience of applying online to be more user-friendly, increasing form completion rates from 39% to 83% and accelerating product delivery. This article examines how these results were achieved.
Design Principles
“Without consistency, you'll never finish what you've started”
- Steve Jobs
Being efficient isn’t just a business thing. Throughout history, all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth, those that use their resources most effectively prevail. At a cellular level, the human brain is able to think more efficiently about familiar concepts1. Naturally, this extrapolates to familiarity-seeking behaviours such as making a home, belonging to a country and speaking the same language as one another. Anything unusual requires extra effort and adds resistance to a user journey. This is why good user experiences feel familiar, smooth and comfortable.
The aim of a web form is to collect information. For the owner of the form, the more information gathered, the better. However, for a user, entering information requires effort. Tasks that require too much effort are less likely to be engaged with. The above example shows a typical user journey, with example statistics on how many users advance to a subsequent step in an application flow. Having just 50% of web traffic make it past step one is not unusual - especially if the page does not offer information in a way that is expected.
“Our chronic discomfort with ambiguity... leads us to lock down safe, comfortable, familiar interpretations, even if they only partially represent reality.”
- Maria Popova

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References
1. Moujahid, A. The metabolic cost of Neuronal Activity (2017), provided in kind by Dr. Dylan Rich, of Princeton University and The University of Cambridge
2. Ren, C., Li, X. et al. Psychometric Properties of the Effort-Reward Imbalance Questionnaire in Frontiers in Psychology Volume 10 (2019)