UX Review for Business Stream
Aim
Simplify the existing payments page to drive a better understanding of why customers pay, understanding bill, and ways to pay. Driving people to make a payment or sign up to direct debit.
Background
The overall feel from the client, is they are looking for some 'quick wins' for this page. Room to make some longer-term recommendations however, it's worth noting that we will be limited to the current site functionality/CMS blocks and there is no allowance for design or development support.
Deliverables
Review by UX Producer to streamline user journeys and overall page content
Delivery of wireframe annotated with proposed changes and recommendations
No allowance for user testing or full on content creation.
Design/Dev to be estimated separately (if required).
Insights/Considerations
The charges section needs to be simplified to better showcase a range of charges for different regions and years. All existing detail needs to remain for compliance.
We get around 2000 visitors to this page each month
Only 5% go down the route to ways to pay and 2% make a payment and around 2% go to set up a direct debit
8% goes to my business stream – this should be a lot more
7% go to contact us suggesting they didn’t find the info they need
Open to recommendations surrounding subpages
Better sign post to subpages available including saving water etc.
Two clear routes should be 'pay' or 'save.
UX Review
The primary purpose of the ‘Payment & Savings’ gateway, as stated in the introductory paragraph, is to provide a home for payments and savings, allowing users to find out how to pay their water bill, find savings, and self service tools to understand their bill.
Information Architecture & Navigation
The simple Information Architecture promotes easy navigation to the Payments & Savings gateway. The child pages for the user are also appropriate: Understanding your bill, Save Money on Business Water Charges and Ways to Pay Your Water Bill. However, when navigating the page, the gateway itself does not promote this. The main CTA on the page is currently too large, meaning that the sub navigation falls below the fold. This main CTA directs the user to the ‘Big deals’ page: https://www.business-stream.co.uk/payment-savings/saving-money/big-deals/
This does not allow a user to find out how to pay their water bill or understand their bill, but might allow them to find savings on business water charges if their site is in Scotland. In the future, it might be worth investigating personalised results dependent on the users geographic location.
User Journey & Content
When landing on the gateway the first key prompt is to direct the user to the Big Deals page through the messaging “Get an instant quote online and bag your big deal”. This messaging is not dissimilar to the first key messaging on ‘Switch to Business Stream’ where the first message is ‘We’ve got the right deal for your water and waste water services’. As a user, after selecting ‘Find the best deal for me’ I would expect to find more information on the types of Big Deals available before going through the online quotation process.
The following introductory copy on the gateway states:
“Welcome to our home of payments and savings. It’s here you’ll find out how to pay your water bill, how we can help you save and, if you’re having difficulty understanding your bill, we have a useful interactive tool to help.”
This copy is straightforward and easy to understand, but as there is no link to the interactive tool, and as a first time visitor it’s difficult to know this tool can be found on the ‘Understanding your bill’ page. The copy following is confusing as it does not relate to how to pay your water bill, how to help you save or the interactive tool but instead is detail on why we pay for water and the water cycle. This information, whilst useful, is not what a user would expect to see when landing on this gateway from reading this intro copy. This information would be better placed on a new child page.
The next steps on this page from a user journey perspective are unclear. The two CTAs available are to ‘Switch to Direct Debit Payments’ and ‘Water Saving Devices & Tips’. As mentioned previously, these two CTAs could be improved. For example the Direct Debit Payments CTA should be replaced with a link to ‘Ways to pay your water bill’ so that the user can get an overview of their options.
As mentioned earlier, the charging statements needs to be simplified further but in the immediate future can be placed on a sub page. It takes a bulk of the retail space on this page, and statistics on how often the PDFs are interacted with would be valuable knowledge.
The first paragraph in ‘About our VAT Charges’ is duplicated and therefore should be removed.
Issues & Recommendations
Of the 2000 visitors to this page each month, only 5% reach the ways to pay page, 2% make a payment and around 2% set up a direct debit. 7% navigate to ‘Contact Us’, indicating the information architecture should be improved.
Subnav can be easily missed and the child pages are not signposted on the gateway at all.
CTA to ‘Switch to Direct Debit payments’ should be replaced with signposting to ‘Ways to pay your bill’
Include a CTA to Understanding your Bill alongside instruction as to what the interactive tool is
The charges section needs to be simplified to better showcase a range of charges for different regions and years.
8% of users go to MyBusinessStream, this figure should be increased.
The legal information ‘About our VAT Charges’, ‘VAT Legal information’, ‘Rates and Charges’ can remain as is for compliance but is perhaps better placed in the tertiary navigation.
The charges section needs to be simplified to better showcase a range of charges for different regions and years. It would be valuable to know how often these PDFs are accessed and if perhaps these charging statements are better placed on a child page.
Investigate adding child pages for ‘Why do we pay for water’ as well as ‘Charging statements’
Restructure the page for clear routes ‘pay’ or ‘save’
