F&A FCU
The Project
F&A Federal Credit Union is based in Monterey Park, CA. F&A was chartered in 1936 to provide financial services to employees of the Los Angeles County Forestry, Fire and Agricultural Departments. As a full-service credit union, it has a broad suite of services for its members. One of the challenges has been positioning unique niche products for its members while making sure to keep their brand relevant as times and technologies changed.
In addition, the site had to be built in a user-friendly way so that marketing staff could easily access the site's pages and make quick changes whenever needed. F&A has always prided themselves on understanding their members, the goal was to better engage users by having information available at their members' fingertips while interacting with a site that was modern and sophisticated.
The Design
As a $2B+ credit union, there's a lot of programs and custom products F&A offers to its members. This presents a navigational challenge (aka "opportunity"), because so much of their content is purposeful and targeted. The old site design has many fixed widths and heights, so the goal of the new design was to give all the page elements room to breath. We "opened up" the design and created a bolder and more modern look, which has allowed members to scan the site with more ease. We also moved the client to a unified single-column design style for the inside pages, which helps increase usability on mobile devices as well.
The Tech
AGP uses the award-winning open-source Joomla to power a number of its websites. The Joomla content management system (CMS) allows for highly customized, but flexible page layouts that can be further tailored to effectively represent the uniqueness of each credit union website. With a user-friendly dashboard, a combination of premium plugins and built-in widgets, it’s easy for site admins to make regular and routine updates.
The Experience
Streamlining the site's templates and navigation has "upped the game" of this website. Another great upgrade is the hand-off from desktop version to mobile/tablet versions—the menu, rates bar and the quicklinks are liquid and seamless when moving from one platform to another. Account and lending cross-promotions are also used throughout the site to create a comprehensive view of how members can manage all of their money needs. Wanting to provide custom solutions for their members as opposed to the traditional promotional approach, the icons and quick link zones presents relevant products and services.
With a functional, intuitive, engaging, ADA conformant and responsive user experience – the new F&A Federal Credit Union website supports its mission “To ensure that our members receive caring and personal service along with exceptional value.”
