WF Nav

Wells Fargo Navigation Reimagined

Create a next gen navigation system that is user-centric and built on best practices and research.

The problem

Wells Fargo’s public site is an important channel for informing and engaging new prospects who are looking for financial products and services. The navigation system today has opportunities to guide customers more clearly and effectively. The current navigation may present problems for site visitors in some of the following ways:
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Overwhelming Options
80 links over 20 columns, including 16 duplicates. The majority of traffic occurs through only 10% of the links.

Credit Card Confusion
It’s not clear where to go on the site to find a new credit card.

Groupings aren't customer centered
The current five groupings are not aligned with the way customers think about banking products and services.

It's not easy to see and compare products
Customers go through a mega menu, then a product home page, and then a scrolling product page before seeing the checking products Wells Fargo has to offer.

Building blocks and guiding principles

Product offerings, industry trends, technology, and WF initiatives will all change. And, of course design and content of the navigation will change. What will change less is the approach. These four building blocks were essential to creating a great navigation:

• Industry leading navigational UI best practices
• Objective, extensible guiding principles
• Groupings based on users’ mental models
• Navigation taxonomy and set of three schemas

These seven principles were used to keep us accountable as we evaluated new navigation systems:

Mental Models Matter
We found that banking customers have two reliable ways of looking at products and services available to them.
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Quick & Easy Wins the Race
Provide fewer choices, organize content according to how people think, limit redundancies, and keep it simple.
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Friendly Conversation
Describe products and services the way customers talk about them. Avoid speaking to customers as if they work in banking.
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Research Reveals
Continually leveraging the many types of research approaches in use at Wells Fargo leads to better informed decisions as the navigation evolves.

Data Delivers
Executives, product managers, marketers, and designers might all have conflicting opinions as to which products and features are most important to customers. Measures such as click data, drop-off analysis, and A/B testing provide unbiased insight into the most important content on Wells Fargo’s site.
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Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Wells Fargo should push the envelope with unique, high-value features and experiences not with unusual, unproven navigation systems.
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Make It Flexible
An effective navigation system includes only a small number of approaches, structures, and templates.

Navigation Taxonomy & Schemas

We created an extendable, needs-based taxonomy and a set of three schemas to guide Wells Fargo in organizing navigation items.Depending on how navigational items convey defined characteristics, they will be expressed through one of three Frameworks.