THE DESIGN

I designed a solution with two goals in mind: to provide users with a co-branded in-house search experience and to increase the membership in USAA’s real estate rewards program.

I wanted users to be able to seamlessly transition from USAA to one of our partnered sites to conduct their search experience, learning about the benefits of the Real Estate Rewards Network in the process.

CONTEXT & CHALLENGE

Military bank USAA had a wide variety of offerings for their members. While they offered real estate services like refinancing and mortgage loans, they did not have a way that members could search for homes via their website.

I was asked to create a search experience that would take users through the search widget and into co-branded home search flow, which included the search results page, property details page, registration flow and rewards value propositional elements.

USER FLOWS

I identified 4 key pathways that users would most likely take in their home-buying process. These four user flows each had an action that triggered user registration: Save a Search, Save a Home, Request a Tour and Contact an Agent.

RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS

Wondering if users had enough context to enroll in the rewards program, I ran some user-testing to validate the designs. Targeting USAA members who were planning on buying a home in the next 6 months, I asked them what their understanding of the rewards program was and how they would learn more about the program. Here’s what I found:

• 100% of participants said they would click “Enroll now” or “Learn more” when asked how they would enroll for the program. Without this, members didn’t feel that they had enough context to want to enroll in the program.

• Users expected to get more information about the program and enroll in it by clicking on the rewards tile (which was not a call to action button).

Based on these findings, I decided to:

• Emphasize visual hierarchy, guiding users to the most relevant information on the page.

• Use copy to highlight the value proposition of the rewards program to boost conversion.

• Create multiple entry-points into the reward program registration flow.

IDEATION & ITERATION

After identifying opportunities for conversion during user testing, I continued iterating and testing each version of the search results page.

REWARD PROGRAM CONVERSION FLOW

It was important to give the user the right information, at the right time, in order to optimize the conversion rate of the rewards program. Using what I had learned during testing, I created a multi-step flow that guided the user through the registration experience.

OUTCOME

This experience went live October 2018. Over the next three months, we saw a 32% increase in new membership for the reward program and overall, USAA members’ service request to user ratio was 68% higher than the rest of our client base.