(Overview)Absa sells vehicle finance in more shapes than one page can hold, from a Shari’ah-compliant product to a page about a single document. I did the information architecture and the user experience for the redesign, and set one page shape all of them could sit in, including the ones built after I had gone.
- Client
- Absa bank
- Sector
- Financial services
- Year
- 2023–2024
- Role
- IA and user experience
- Scale
- 29 pages
- Status
- Shipped
A page that sells finance and a page that points at a document have nothing in common. They had to look like they did.
Some pages sell finance. The standard instalment sale, the Shari’ah-compliant product and the auction pages all end in an application.
Some sell a service instead. FASTBuy is a way to sell your car when in distress, the dealership page is a way to buy one privately, and the debt-help page sells nothing at all.
And some just hand you a document. Two of the twenty-nine exist so that somebody who already has the loan can get a NaTIS certificate or a cross-border letter without phoning a branch.
Without a pattern, they would have looked like twenty-nine different companies, and every change after launch would have meant twenty-nine changes.
Every page got one shape, and the button is the only thing that changes.
One page shape carries all twenty-nine: a headline, a single line under it, and one button that says what the page can actually do. Finance my car where you can apply, Apply now on the auctions, Call me back where a person has to ring you, Terms and Conditions on the promotion.
The pattern is doing its clearest work on the two smallest pages. The NaTIS page and the cross-border letter page carry the same sentence, one noun apart: “Easily access your NaTIS document from your Banking App or Absa Online.” Nobody had to design those. The shape was already there.
- Pages redesigned
- 29
- Distinct page patterns
- One
- Products, one calculator
- 2
- Labels, not a rebuild
- 5
I benchmarked the competition, designed the information architecture, and set the page shape and the pictures that fill it. Other people wrote the code.
What I did
- Information architecture across the section
- User experience and page layout
- Competitive benchmark (Confidential)
- Analysis
- Image selection
What the team did
- Front-end development
- Everything after handover
01 / 06
Use the left and right arrow keys to move through the images.
(The call)The Shari’ah-compliant product got the same calculator as the standard one, with five labels changed. Interest rate became profit mark-up.
Two products, two calculators is the safe answer, and its appeal is real: nothing on the Shari’ah-compliant page could ever inherit wording from the standard one by accident. The cost is that they drift. Both carry the same rate today, and the day it changes somebody has to know there are two places to change it. A Shari’ah-compliant page showing a stale rate, or quietly reverting to the word interest after an edit, is a worse failure than anything five shared labels can produce.
The live site
I was on the next project before this one reached development. A pattern is built for exactly that: it has to work without the person who made it.
I have not seen the analytics since it went live, so I cannot tell you it converted better and I am not going to imply it. What I can point at is on the live site and open to anyone: one shape holding all of them, a calculator that is correct in two products instead of two that drift apart, and two utility pages nobody needed a designer for.
