(Overview)Absa lends on a house eleven different ways, from a first-time buyer bond to a Flexi Reserve, and 59 pages carry all of it. I was lead designer on the redesign: the information architecture, the page layout, and the usability testing that told us which half of it was actually broken.
- Client
- Absa bank
- Sector
- Financial services
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Lead UX Designer
- Scale
- 59 pages
- Status
- Shipped · measuring
Eleven ways to borrow against a house, and the names do half the explaining.
A first-time home buyer bond tells you what it is. So does Buy to Let, and so does Switch your Home Loan. Then there is Readvance, Further Advance, Flexi Reserve and Future Bond, which are four different answers to the question of how you get more money out of a house you already own.
Eleven products, fifty-nine pages, and a reader who does not yet know which one they need. The pages are not the application. They are where somebody works out whether to start one at all.
The obvious risk was the structure: eleven products is a lot to organise and easy to get wrong. Testing said the structure was fine. The words were not.
The structure survived testing. The vocabulary did not.
Twelve people, moderated, split evenly: six who have or have had a home loan, six who never have. The information architecture came through it with minimal changes, which is the result you want and rarely the one you get.
The language did not. Terminology and several product names were read to mean something other than what they meant, so the words changed. The calculator moved off the hero on every page below the home page. And the session produced a list of changes to the calculator itself that a later version can act on.
The findings and the presentation are confidential. What is not confidential is that the testing happened, what it moved, and that this one is being measured.
- Pages redesigned
- 59
- Home loan products
- 11
- Moderated sessions
- 12
- Changes the IA needed
- Few
I led the design and ran the testing. The benchmark and the heuristic analysis were already done when I arrived, by a colleague, and I worked from both.
What I did
- Information architecture across the 59 pages
- User experience and page layout
- Usability testing, 12 participants, moderated
- Analysis
- Image selection
What the team did
- Competitive benchmark and heuristic analysis, before I joined
- Front-end development
01 / 06
Use the left and right arrow keys to move through the images.
(The call)The calculator stayed in the hero on the home page and moved down everywhere else. On a phone it was costing people their place in the site.
Putting it in the hero on all fifty-nine pages, which is the tidier answer and the one a pattern argues for. Consistency is worth a great deal across a section this size, and breaking it needs a reason better than taste. The reason was that the two pages are doing different jobs. The home page has to help somebody work out what they can afford. A product page has to tell them which of eleven products they are standing in, and on a small screen a calculator in the hero takes that answer below the fold. Same component, same content, moved four hundred pixels, because the question changed.
The live site
I went in braced for the structure and the structure was fine. It was the words that were failing, and nothing but testing was going to tell me.
Eleven products, fifty-nine pages, and the thing I would have spent the budget on was the sitemap. Twelve people showed me it did not need much. They also showed me that names the bank has used for years do not survive contact with somebody buying their first house. That is not a finding you reason your way to at a desk, and it is the argument for testing the part of the work you are least worried about.
