RIA WEB

Problem: The previous Ria site was slow, dated looking, and limited in scalability as the company grew.

Goal: Remodeling of interface architecture, interface design, interaction design, and current brand material.

Solution: An improvement of the customer’s overall experience. Success is measured by increased customer acquisition and retention through up-to-date UX/UI market trends.

Started over 30 years ago, today Ria is the third largest global money remittance company in the world, but until January 2019, the Ria website was sorely lacking. Here are some of the old site's main issues:

• No price calculator on homepage

• Not edge-to-edge responsive design

• Wasted screen real estate

• Slow load times

• Unclear brand message

• Multiple type treatments, icon styles, card styles, and page templates

• Heavy navigation 

• Inconsistant content messaging

• Lack of human connection

Project Overview

Process:

1. Inventory of current site visuals and content

2. Review/mapping of current user flows

3. Review of current customer

4. Review of competitive analysis

Why do people send with Ria?

Whether they are sending money home to support their family or overseas to build their dream house, Ria customers often have the same primary requirements: security, reliability, speed, and value.  

Getting to know the user

• Based on phone interviews and focus groups, we broke our users into 6 different personas: Investor, Gifter, Family Supporter, One-off Sender, Traveler, and Emergency Support.

• These unique personas helped guide the process of discovery for the customers' overall needs.

• By better understanding the Ria customer we could more effectively target new customers while retaining existing ones.

• These personas were turned into posters and displayed in the office so that all employees could have a deeper understanding of the Ria customer.

One of the common issues we discovered from interviewing customers was that the current Ria site felt dated.  There were also concerns that the overall functionally was lacking compared to competitor's sites. The solution was to make both experience and visual updates to better serve our customers.

After site inventory of existing pages and UI components was completed, the basic user flows were established. We were finally able to focus on the look and feel in addition to our brand's message. Several mood boards of market trends were created in additional to potential visual designs. 

Due to a tight deadline, some functionally improvements were taken out of consideration. However, a large win was the addition of a price calculator on the homepage, a new dashboard, and improved site navigation. 

Weeks of creating visual mockups led to several design concepts, which inevitably led to testing the best 4 options. 

Testing was done via usertesting.com, where 4 new designs were tested against each other. 10 testers participated in each study, and while there was no set age or income requirement, testers were asked whether they had transferred money internationally before. Then, the top 2 designs were tested against each other. From that list, the highest rated design was tested against the existing Ria homepage. Additionally, a price calculator was added to the existing homepage option, so user did not focus on functionality differences. Testers were asked a series of questions including trustability, usability, readability, and visuals, and the final concept went through 3 iterations.

The winning concept

Deliverables:

1. Collection of assets

2. Design timeline

3. Concept/prototypes

4. Testing

5. Pixel prefect designs

The result was a clean, simple, and modern design that better tells our customer's story. In addition to a new home page design, new landing and corridor pages were created. To further unify the look and feel, a new UI brand guide was established.

New dashboard

The dashboard was created to match UI and functionally updates. Now a user can quick send or create a new order within a single page view. This has resulted in a more personalized customer experience.