In Sept 2007 I designed a new landing page and added a number of enhancements to the application form. Primarily these were client-side enhancements based on usability. The design was never fully utilized but the application form enhancements were retrofitted to the current site.

This new design was an attempt to add clearer messaging and more elements to reinforce the users trust in the site/company. This included a single core message at the top (mirroring the PPC copy in use), three simple bullet points on the left, addition of “lender logo’s” and the added prominence of the “security & Privacy” comment.

One of the largest changes to the application form was the addition of AJAX (using prototype) to implement server side validation (the exact code that would run on a form submit) when the user tabs out of the field. This enables us to validate more accurately than javascript alone and we tick the users answers to give a sense of context within the page – and a sense achievement and progress.

Along with AJAX, I also added javascript to stop invalid characters (such as text in amount fields) to stop invalid input before the user even leaves the field. In this case we also added a change in background colour (for a flicker) to acknowledge the users key press.

I implemented tooltip style help for the user, which enabled me to add more text than I had on previous versions of the application form and add some much needed explanation of some of the more complex fields (especially on later pages).

This was one area I felt I could improve the users experience more than any other. By using a 3rd party address search behind the scenes I was able to remove several existing fields and look-up the address (bar the first line) from a postcode. This was implemented using AJAX and server side code.

Once I had searched for the postcode, I also had a list of possible “first lines”. I again used AJAX to filter this list on the users selection and present a suggestion style pop-up to select their house. They are still able to manually enter their address (filtering this list as they type) but the look-up should improve speed and accuracy of entering the address – especially for long house and/or road names.

The next two pages of the application form follow exactly the same style as those already shown.

After testing this application form for a limited time, we saw a 2-5% improvement on click-through-rate on each of the pages, with a 30% improvement on the address page.

Due to company politics the new design was removed, but the benefits of the application form changes were kept, as I subsequently implemented them on the existing control. We continue to see the same improvements on this page, especially on the address search page.