Design that delivers
Considering both desktop and mobile visitors from the onset, ZAG’s design team created a custom responsive design strategy using new brand standards from UCU, the new site architecture and digital design and usability best practices. ZAG presented distinctive design concepts that actualized UCU’s reinvigorated brand style, featuring bold graphical elements, signature imagery, and unique iconography. The designers connected with UCU and its branding agency to select from a mix of stock images and custom photography to showcase UCU’s key audiences throughout the site. The resulting look and feel captures the essence of UCU’s new branding, connecting with prospective and existing members with relatable photos and eye-catching visuals. To offer a seamless user experience for all visitors, including those with visual disabilities, the new UCU site conforms to current ADA website compliance guidelines.
Functionality at the forefront
To meet the functional, security and sophisticated marketing needs of the new site and ensure it was easy to manage for UCU administrators, ZAG developers built the new site on the Kentico CMS. UCU administrators can utilize the content management system to easily perform site updates, especially through custom locations management and rates management tools. To ensure better adoption of the redesigned website, ZAG also developed a site tour to highlight some of the new features.
Empowerment through education
To help its members make smarter financial decisions, UCU invested in various forms of educational content on the new site. Site visitors can seek guidance for major milestones, accessing tips, tools, videos and services aligned to their life stages. Offering financial wellness, literacy and counseling, the redesigned website also integrates with third-party content providers, while also leveraging ZAG’s own content library of educational articles. The new site balances contextual information at the page level with convenient repositories of resources, so users can easily access frequently asked questions, rates and calculators as needed. Furthermore, ZAG’s copywriters captured UCU’s new brand voice with engaging and descriptive copywriting, which also adheres to best practices for organic search engine optimization.