2x conversion on the mobile homepage
Redesigned a top-10 Russian bank's mobile homepage from discovery to design language. Validated with eye-tracking and a staged A/B rollout: product-showcase conversion 4.2% → 8.14%, with no metric regression.
Role
Product Designer
Industry
FinTech
Year
2024
Platform
Web
Context
High Scale. High Pressure. Brand New Realities
Millions of people open Bank’s site every month and 80% of them arrive on a phone. The homepage has one job — get them into the right product section — and it was not doing it. When the bank’s iOS app disappeared from the App Store, the same page also became the main route into the mobile bank. The design had been copied by competitors, carried years of mismatched campaign creatives, had no guidelines, and no longer absorbed the new sections the business kept asking for.
I worked as the designer in a working group with the homepage product manager and the site and marketing leads, meeting weekly for design critique — in a bank that size, the fastest way to lose three months of work is to design it where nobody is watching.
Challenge
Constraints
— The iOS app was gone from the store and was not coming back. The web had to carry its distribution.
— Information architecture stayed as it was. A restyling, not a re-architecture.
— Traffic to product pages could not fall — on any product line.
— Familiar paths had to survive, so returning users would not have to learn the site again.
— Decisions had to be defensible in critique against telemetry, not against taste.
Discovery
Diagnosing a leaky Conversion Funnel
Click, attention and scroll maps gave the diagnosis. Under 1% clicked the hero CTA, under 0.5% ever reached business banking, under 0.2% touched a secondary promo card, and 7% of mobile users scrolled past the first fold. Underneath there was no design system at all: every page carried different menus, banners and typography — and the look had already been copied by most competitors. A top-ten-bank teardown in a spreadsheet turned into two constraints: 9 of 11 ran a multi-slide carousel hero, and nobody animated beyond sliders.
Under the hood: no design system. Every page had different menus, banners and typography — and the look had already been copied by most competitors.
<1%
click-through rate on the primary hero banner CTA
<0.5%
of visitors ever reached the business banking vertical
<0.2%
interaction on secondary promotional marketing cards
7%
of mobile users ever scrolled past the initial page fold
Click / Attention / Scroll maps
Inconsistent design system
Core concept
What if the web felt like the app?
I explored different variants via wireframes. To find the core idea fast, I prototyped in grayscale on purpose, so the team debated structure, not button colors, typography, and photography. Most felt overloaded — like borrowing from other industries. None of them resonated with our product yet.
People spend most of their screen time inside mobile apps. So I designed the homepage to feel like one.
01 - Full-Screen Video Hero
Instant cinematic storytelling for our primary value proposition.
02 - Native Bottom-Sheet UI
An interactive app-style tray that naturally slides up to reveal navigation options.
03 - Centralized Product Showcase
Moving away from deep, hidden navigation menus to place core financial products exactly one tap away from the root homepage.
Solutions I explored & sketched
One screen became a design language
A reusable system, not a one-off page — a feeling-led moodboard, a defined palette, and semantic blocks with the first component rules. I was designing the look of the future site — so it had to scale.
Engineered highly reusable layout blocks (Heros, Showcase Units, Micro-Promos, Contextual Feeds). Enforced сonstraints and intentional typographic contrast to maximize text legibility on small mobile displays. Standardized corner treatments and shadow depths to entirely eradicate design system gap.
Conceptual examples of blocks not included in the final version
After numerous design iterations and extensive working group discussions, I finalized the core widgets and presented a comprehensive homepage concept. Beyond the "hero" section, a key concept was the introduction of a showcase area designed to guide users toward the right products. While previously users had to visit a specific business page before selecting a suitable product, this can now be done directly from the homepage.
Initial prototype for homepage testing
Validation
Desirability means nothing without Usability
With Research Center I ran usability testing on the prototype with an eye-tracker, a timed old-versus-new comparison, and an emotional-response test of the video hero against a static one. Two segments — clients and non-clients, 25–55, on iPhone. The concept held: no critical difficulties, a faster and more intuitive journey, a better first impression, and the video did not distract from target actions. It also failed in four specific places, and that became the fix list before development started.
Photos from prototype testing
What failed
— Product naming and service descriptions were unclear.
— Entry points into the mobile bank were not readable.
— Site search went unnoticed.
— Respondents misread the bottom sheet.
What improved
14.0s > 10.5s
median time to first click
~7s faster
to find a credit card
~3.5s faster
to find savings
40%
of users skipped deep navigation entirely and went straight to the showcase cards
Old version: CR 4.2% vs New version: CR 8.14%
Impact
Rigorous A/B Testing Delivers 2x Conversion Lift
The Rollout Strategy deployed progressively through a controlled live A/B test across global production traffic (5% → 50% → 100% of users distribution).
Product-showcase conversion went 4.2% > 8.14%. Logins to the web bank +3.84 pp, hero CTA +1.74 pp, credit-card applications +1.89 pp, personal loans +1.64 pp, app downloads +1.21 pp, homepage bounce -2.00 pp. Not one primary or secondary business metric regressed. The naming and search problems research had surfaced went into the backlog rather than into this release.
Final version
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