Tuition Portal
Gulf Coast Bank's tuition portal enables parents to manage their child's school tuition, review loan details, and payment history. In order to simplify and speed up the onboarding process for parents, this redesigned interface provides a more descriptive and guided experience for users. The primary goal was to empower parents to successfully sign up and manage their school loans. This was achieved by clearly displaying action items, due dates, and the distinction between child and school through an intuitive UI.
Contributions
Problem
The client requested we redesign their website to improve customer engagement and improve reporting for admins. Their old site was causing several problems, including a convoluted customer path and a challenging sign-up process. These issues were negatively impacting Gulf Coast Bank and had to be resolved in a timely manner. To cope with the various pain points and move forward with a more efficient website, the client needed significant UI/UX assistance.
Solution
To address the client’s concerns, our team provided a new UI that reinforces the Gulf Coast Bank brand, streamlines the user flow, and makes the sign-up process more intuitive. We designed a clean and user-friendly interface that simplifies the customer’s path and provides quick and easy registration. We also improved reporting and fee setup for admins by modifying how additional purchases are tied to specific school years in the backend. All of these solutions aimed to create a positive experience regardless of the user group along with reinforcing a trustworthy and recognizable identity for Gulf Coast Bank.
Design Process
Elevate the Brand
Our design team first focused on enhancing the client’s brand identity by featuring the logo mark as a key design element on the parent dashboard. We also better utilized brand colors by incorporating orange to help highlight action items and the teal wave to frame the dashboard content.
Ultimately, we aimed to create a friendly and authentic atmosphere that reflects Gulf Coast Bank’s simple and effective banking solutions. We achieved this through a balanced color palette, a few gentle gradients, and various dynamic elements that emphasize vital site components.
Simplify the User Flow
Another key aspect of the development process for the redesign was focusing on user flow. Our team placed a strong emphasis on understanding the needs and goals of the different user groups. We employed this understanding to create a user flow that guides users through the various tasks and actions they need to perform while ensuring that the UI is intuitive and practical. We created a user-friendly onboarding process to guide users through a smooth and easy introduction to the system. A user flow showing all the loops and iterations of the process was used to align the requirements with a good user experience and served as a guideline for the final result.
Flexibility is Key
No two customers are alike since families can range in size with children who also vary in age. This results in some parents having one school loan to sign up for and manage while others could have multiple children at different schools, with multiple loans spanning years at a time.
To accommodate this complex requirement, we developed a flexible design solution that can grow and expand depending on the customer. For improved accessibility, we designed a user-centered interface that works well on various devices all while ensuring that the website loads quickly and efficiently.
Outcome
Our collaboration with Gulf Coast Bank was a memorable experience filled with pleasant interactions and inspirational challenges. From conducting extensive research and envisioning a flexible interface to implementing a solution that simplifies the complex process of customer engagement, we ultimately helped users easily achieve their goals. Overall, our partnership with Gulf Coast Bank resulted in a successful redesign and had a positive impact on their business.