A Design Strategy That Converted Front Door Bounces Into Revenue

SUMMARY

Faced with a staggering 70% homepage bounce rate, FXCM needed immediate help. Consulting out of dotmatrix studios, I conducted a comprehensive analysis of the experience by running a heuristic evaluation, and then invested in framing human-centered expectations. We could then align content precisely with user needs, simplify navigation, and transform the site's architecture and content strategy.

The impact was profound: a 3x increase in account conversions, 42% improvement in organic demo sign-ups, and a 20% reduction in bounce rates. The redesign achieved all-time high sign-ups and dominant market share on over 1100 tracked non-brand keywords, establishing a solid foundation for sustained business growth.

KEY LEARNINGS

Human-centered strategies bring precise results - Modeling design personas proved invaluable for aligning the team and guiding architectural and editorial decisions. The personas, derived from thorough investigations into market motivations and patterns, provided precise direction for content creation and user experience improvements.

Heuristic evaluations drive alignment - Conducting a heuristic evaluation served as a relatively quick, low-cost, dependable method for reaching alignment on necessary investments. It highlighted the importance of prioritizing content based on primary persona expectations, reorganizing navigation for clarity, maintaining consistency in language and UI elements, and enhancing information hierarchy for essential call-to-actions.

A simplified taxonomy improves engagement - Simplifying the site's taxonomy and design language significantly improved the user experience. By aiming content directly at target personas and creating clear paths for potential clients, the redesign achieved a distinct increase in account conversions, an improvement in demo sign-ups, and a reduction in bounce rates.

Consistent paths improve conversion rates - Stressing the importance of consistent paths across the entire site, especially in the header and content pages, played a crucial role in driving higher conversion rates. Additionally, clear affordance to calls-to-action through a singular color choice in these areas emphasized the desired user action, contributing to improved conversion metrics.

Streamlined signup processes boost conversion - Transitioning from a complex account setup to a light authentication process significantly cut bounce rates and improved conversion. It underscores the impact of minimizing user friction for an efficient user journey.

DISCOVERY

FXCM, the top trading platform in the Forex market, reached out to have a conversation about their inordinately high bounce rate throughout their marketing site. The primary goal of their front door is to convert visitors to sign-up for either a practice account or a live trading account, and the site was severely under-performing. Unique inbounds were low, conversion paths were being abandoned, and users were bouncing off the homepage at a ~70% clip.

Usability was a mess.

My recommendation was to engage in a short discovery project and run a heuristic evaluation. This would allow me to review the entire experience and score the site across a number of explicit information architecture, interface design, and content heuristics. We could then sit at the table with marketing executives and agree on next steps.

I spent the next few weeks examining every inch of the site, scoring heuristics, documenting examples, and writing my review. The average score (1-5 scale) was 2.3 per each heuristic. I suggested the following as the primary issues to focus on in a redesign:

• Prioritize content based on primary persona expectations and needs

• Reorganize and rewrite the navigation to be shallow, narrow, and understandable

• Be consistent with the language, form, and function of all UI elements

• Increase signal through information hierarchy, in particular with essential CTA’s

• Invest in making user’s lives easier

• Provide both contextual and destination help

After reviewing with the client, we agreed to re-architect the site, provide specifications for an onboarding experience, and outline a content strategy.

Aim for the Prospect; Support the Client

The heuristic evaluation made clear that the site was attempting to speak to everyone, yet no one in particular. This scattershot approach was on full display in the navigation structure and nomenclature, the wide-ranging focus of educational pages, and across the various product descriptions.

Since personas and context scenarios weren’t previously leveraged, the information taxonomy and content led users to meander about the site, and subsequent content additions only added to the confusion. The same was happening with CTA’s and sectional additions — the target audience was only generally identified and design standards weren’t consistently followed.

What was communicated and how it was presented was confusing.

I didn’t have the budget to interview a breadth of potential or actual clients, so I sat down with my sponsor and the marketing team and walked through their understanding of:

1. Their existing site visitors and

2. What market was most valuable to attract and why

The conversation was informed by market profiles, which were generated through exhaustive surveys and focus groups with both prospects and existing clients. I then created “stake-in-the-ground” design personas, synthesizing FXCM’s insights into human form with representative expectations.

In our age of rapidly shipping product and design by quantitative patterns, people tend to overlook personas. If archetypes are derived from investigations into the motivational, behavioral, and aspirational patterns of the market, I find personas to be invaluable, even if the artifact only serves as a tool to drive alignment across teams.

In this case, the artifacts held space for us to align on human-centered architectural and editorial decisions.

Each persona’s expectations gave precise direction to the editorial team as they published new articles on their content calendar while I designed a simplified Advantages container to house content speaking to the needs of seasoned forex traders not familiar with FXCM, and a Basics section for the traditional stock trader interested in understanding how forex works.

Simplified Taxonomy and a New Design Language

As the team moved towards simplifying content by aiming it directly at our personas — speaking directly to potentials and existing clients in ways they would understand and find useful — I simplified the topical navigation, creating affordance towards key conversion paths.

I began on the landing page — a large percentage of traffic from keyword buys directed potentials to the front door — and worked my way through the key sections of the site. My primary concerns were to:

• Establish clear paths for potential clients to track

• Design an evergreen home for a sign-up call-to-action in the header

• Design a first visit on-boarding experience for forex platform newbs

• Design a hero section — real estate to bubble up events, seminars and educational videos.

I presented a sketch of the information design framed with persona representation to marketing leadership, highlighting which section would speak to which user(s). We reached alignment rather quickly, and the exercise sold the final wireframe of the key templates across the site.

To reach higher conversion rates, we stressed the importance of keeping paths consistent across the same areas of the interface, particularly in the header and in the rail of content pages.

My wireframes assigned contrasting colors to emphasize to my visual designer the kind of affordance we needed to drive traffic to the practice account CTA across the site. We also aligned on clearly describing the details of a practice account above the fold on the homepage. This set clear expectations so that a potential client would have less reason to bounce out of their purchase cycle on-site in order to hunt down foundational information.

On content pages, we tackled the process for submitting practice account information by moving from a complicated wizard to a few fields in the content rail, with the hypothesis that such simplle, light authentication would reduce bounces. If we were right, our conversion numbers would jump.

And wow did they jump.

Business Impact

The redesign was impactful across the board. AJ Mihalic, Global Director of SEO, shares these business outcomes on his LinkedIn profile:

The project focused on improved UX, IA, and SEO, and it was so successful the changes were rolled out to the international domains:

- Improved account conversion by 3x for search, 1.5x overall, and achieved all-time sign-up highs
- Improved demo sign-up conversion rate by +42% for organic search, +20% overall
- Decreased bounce-rate by -20% overall
- Improved organic (SEO) visibility and achieved all-time high page-1 rankings on high value terms
- Achieved dominant market share on >1100 tracked non-brand keywords