Center for Financial Services Innovation (UX, Design, WordPress & AWS) #casestudy

Website Redesign

FORWARD-THINKING

The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) is the authority on consumer financial health, leading a network of committed financial services innovators to build better consumer products and practices.

CFSI needed a way to present their new initiatives with a fresh design. The challenge was to be able to work within their organization, allowing many departments to update and interface with the website, while also keeping true to the brand and experience.

We implemented our WordPress based layout platform which enables anyone in the organization to build pages, publish research, and capture emails in a variety of page layouts. Employees of CFSI could work with the layout tool, without any required HTML, or CSS expertise, and publish pages following the CFSI style guide. Content would not look “template-y” or cookie-cutter and would express a brand meant for today.

DATA-DRIVEN DESIGN

CFSI came to ATTCK looking to refresh its website design while remaining true to its brand. Our approach was to interview our clients, then study the analytics data from the previous CFSI website and create journey maps and wireframes. We wanted to ensure a seamless and effective user experience.

UX & GRAPHIC DESIGN

We explored three main user groups and their goals:

During this process, we identified several opportunities for improvement.

Once the user flow was established, our designers applied a robust design with custom icon illustrations to create a unique web experience on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

The redesign included creating a great content editing experience. Our customized, WordPress-based layout platform enables CFSI content editors to build pages, publish research, and capture emails in a variety of page layouts. They work with the layout tool, with no coding experience required, and publish pages that automatically conform to the branded style guide.

ATTCK not only helped us improve the design of our website, but they’ve made our research more accessible, which was important to us. CFSI has a large library of publications tailored toward policy-makers, banks, credit unions, financial service providers, nonprofits, financial tech companies, media — and more. ATTCK implemented a new site architecture and cross-linking structure that makes it much easier for users find and engage with topics that matter to them most.

Laura Barger

Chief Marketing Officer, CFSI

PERFORMANCE & SCALABILITY

Web traffic was a major consideration. With the new infrastructure, CFSinnovation.org can now handle overall spikes of traffic, with the ability to focus on specific research pages, in an automated manner. The servers will react to high traffic and immediately scale to an appropriate size. When traffic returns to normal, the servers will scale down automatically.

This configuration allows the environments to handle traffic without manual developer oversight or wasted server resources running longer than needed, thus reducing CFSI’s web infrastructure costs.

INFRASTRUCTURE & SECURITY

With the new launch, we migrated CFSI to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) back-end to further enable continuous integration and improve security. With the new infrastructure, deployments are faster between staging and production environments, we’ve included automated periodic database backups and strengthened server integrity.

ANALYTICS & MARKETING

Measuring how visitors use the website and reporting that data back in a useful way was key for the new site. Google Analytics was integrated beyond default page view reporting to capture data on the research items, entry and exit pages, and specific inter-page events. This includes custom reports showing the performance of specific predefined conversion goals.

This knowledge provides input to strategies for future research initiatives, delivery methods, and content marketing.

IMPACT

The UX provided by the redesigned site supports the client’s goals:

In addition, this new platform drastically improves CFSI’s ability to create and manage pages, text and images, documents, events, and private user content. Given the breadth of CFSI’s reach and the long-lasting difficulties of their previous website, this newfound agility will allow them to quickly deliver customized content and timely marketing messages to their user base.