2Be Equity Advantage
Helping affluent boomers help their kids get into the property market by accessing their equity in their homes.
The goal of the project
2Be Equity Advantage were a brand new type of finance coming to the market and approached Honest Fox to do their website for them. We needed to build an entire site without branding or any solid business goals set, along with a ‘coming soon’ page in case of a media link, due to the high profile of the stakeholders in the business.
My role
Lead the UX Design Process through discovery, wireframes, presentations of designs and project management to offboard the client.
Discovery
The discovery process was quite rapid for this project, and the first thing that we did was identify our target audience. We knew we needed to target affluent baby boomers, that had enough equity in their houses that they could borrow against the equity they hold, to give their children a loan. With that assumption, the first thing we did was some research about the target audience to pull some key traits, which were then fleshed out into our two personas and a journey map.
The personas that we built for the website were the boomers themselves who were becoming the bank of mum & dad, and the children who were looking for loans to get into the property market.
What we discovered
During the rapid discovery phase for this project, we were able to find some really interesting information around baby boomers and their children who were identified as our target users. For the baby boomers, our primary users, we discovered that they were asset rich but cash poor, and motivated by leaving a legacy to their children. They also had quite a few concerns around cyber security, making poor investments and potentially finding themselves in debt again after paying off all of their mortgages and loans.
For the kids of the baby boomers, they are the millennials who are really wanting to get into the property market and want that financial stability for the future, but really struggle with saving for a house deposit and are worried with the rapidly increasing house prices.
The secondary persona who were the kids of the baby boomers actually resonated really well with myself being in the same age demographic, and it was helpful to be able to understand the struggles and product needs that millennials were looking for in an offering such as 2Be Equity Advantage.
After a few chats with the 2Be team, we also came to understand that they really wanted to position themselves as educators of ‘the bank of mum & dad’ which was interesting. Some of the content that they were wanting to produce around the process of managing a loan like this, and the risks of becoming the bank of mum & dad might not have really enticed or made the end user’s feel overly comfortable with choosing their new way of lending. This meant that we really needed to take the element of building trust and making sure that our primary persona felt secure through over ways on the website.
We were also needing to work with an external technology team that were going to be developing mortgage and lending calculators, but we had to build the pages for these to sit on and make sure they were in line with the general design of the website.
Sitemap for the new website
The sitemap for this website started off as quite lean until it came to the education pages that we needed to build out. Towards the end of the design process, we had to make a blog-like section that was going to store all of the education pieces and articles, along with some downloadable PDF’s explaining different parts of the process or problems users might come across when lending their equity through 2Be.
Wireframes of key pages
Having the sitemap completed, I was then able to build out the wireframes for the pages on the website. Below you’ll be able to find the home page, how it works page and the education listing page.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
This project turned out to be really difficult in the way of stakeholder management and trying to put ourselves as the design professionals towards the client. The timeline for the project definitely stretched out by almost double to what we had initially planned so we could make sure that we were inline with the client’s expectations.
The wireframes and the end website look quite different due to the amount of feedback and rapid changes that were requested throughout the process too.
Unfortunately, the end of the project saw us hand the site over to an independent Webflow designer. This was a pretty difficult 4 week window where we had to make sure everything was ready to go and all the other bits of technology were handed to the new designer and internal technology team.
What went well
Learning how to manage a client from more of a Project Management role was really helpful, especially with how high-profile these clients were. We were working with ex CEO’s of massive banks like ANZ and Westpac, so their expectations of our turnarounds and time we had to spend on this singular project were really tricky to meet. I was definitely able to pull out some skills I had from being a Customer Success Manager, especially when it came to helping the client transition over to a new design team.
The finished project also seems to be going well and 2Be has had a decent amount of coverage through the news and online channels. It is really cool to see a client that had no sort of online presence or any sort of ready for market product get up and running and also get the traction that they were hoping for.
What didn’t go so well
The feedback loops that we got ourselves into throughout the process made it really hard to make any meaningful changes to the website. Towards the end of the project, there was only so much design thinking and process we could present to try and make sure things looked and worked in a certain way that we could do without some serious resistance. A lot of the later changes were driven by the client.
Throughout the process it was really difficult to align on the understanding of design, marketing and technology as well. There was a lot of gaps in the way of digital understandings and maturity which I think is what lead to the massive feedback loops we found ourselves in at each stage of the process from discovery, through to marketing and the site build.
The website was also built on Webflow which was far from ideal. I feel as though we got some pretty solid results in the way of UI and getting the branding across the site, but the platform is quite limited with what can be done, and was also really clunky to make any changes in.
In the end, the business relationship broke down which led to us transferring the site over to an independent Webflow specialist who is now managing the website. As I mentioned earlier, there was a four week transitional period which was really difficult to manage. There was a huge amount of training on Hubspot, Google Analytics and Webflow that weren’t originally planned, but we had to do to make the handover as clean as possible.
The End Result
The site has been edited since we handed it over to the client, and isn’t reflective of the finished project that we shipped