Focused on member satisfaction, Credit Union of Southern California (CU SoCal) provides world-class service and unparalleled convenience throughout Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino CA counties. This progressive financial institution needed to redesign its consumer-facing website to reflect its contemporary brand and vibrant culture, and hired ZAG Interactive to make it happen. CU SoCal sought to deliver top-notch usability, founded on simplified navigation, mobile responsive design, ADA conformance, and helpful member solution information. Providing both a branding opportunity and a marketing machine, the credit union’s vision for its digital hub was to empower its members to make better decisions along the site journey.
Planning the credit union website redesign
ZAG and CU SoCal kicked things off with a discovery session to determine short- and long-term goals for the new site. From there, ZAG’s digital strategists devised the website architecture to re-imagine information with an easy-to-use navigation convention.
Creating a custom design
With the site architecture determined, ZAG’s design team created two responsive designs to choose from, both meeting all strategic goals and each offering a unique perspective on the brand. CU SoCal’s key stakeholders chose one creative concept but validated their decisions and the proposed user experience through online usability testing. The final design was extended to all design templates.
Building a responsive, conformant website in Kentico
When the design phase was complete, ZAG’s development team created a functional prototype of the site, and then built the full the website in the Kentico CMS. This custom site build included several third-party integrations such as online banking, online account opening, financial calculators and more. There were also numerous custom widgets to accommodate the banded design approach. Additionally, the site was built to be WCAG 2.0 AA conformant to provide a positive experience for all users, no matter their disability. Finally, ZAG's marketing team wrote custom meta titles and descriptions to lay the foundation for continued SEO.
After months of collaboration between ZAG and CU SoCal, the result is a powerful, user-friendly credit union website site that services both member needs and marketing goals for the credit union, and allows CUSoCal to compete in today’s financial services world.