Revitalizing Canara HSBC Life's Digital Front Door

A UX Revamp for Reduced Drop-offs and Improved Product Engagement

Project Overview

Canara HSBC Life Insurance is a well-established joint venture committed to providing comprehensive life insurance solutions. 

Timeline

6 months

Tools Used

Figma for design and prototyping, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for content management.

Project Goal

To significantly improve the user experience for new and existing visitors on the website, leading to reduced homepage drop-offs, enhanced engagement with key product information and tools, and a more intuitive path from marketing campaigns to relevant product details, ultimately driving higher online policy consideration and lead generation.

My Role: Lead UX Designer

As the Lead UX Designer, My core responsibilities spanned the entire UX lifecycle, including heuristic audits, discovery sessions, user research, IA redesign, wireframing, prototyping, visual design direction, and close collaboration with cross-functional teams through implementation and testing. 

Team Structure

The project team consisted of a UX Director, two other UX Designers, Product Managers, a Technical Lead, and a team of Developers.

The Challenge: A Fragmented User Experience

Prior to the revamp, the Canara HSBC Life website suffered from a fragmented and complex user experience, leading to high homepage drop-off rates for new visitors. A comprehensive heuristic evaluation revealed a confusing information architecture with unclear labeling and illogical structuring, high cognitive load, and inefficient search, making content hard to discover.

Confusing and complex Information Architecture leading to high homepage drop-off rates for new visitors.

Suboptimal transition and experience from marketing campaigns to landing pages, hindering lead generation.

Poor usability and clarity in critical sections like insurance calculators and product pages, preventing users from effectively evaluating products.

AUDIT & RESEARCH

Website Evaluation, Heuristic Evaluation, Analytics Review, Competitive Analysis

DISCOVER

User Needs, Business Goals, Client Discovery Sessions, Target User Groups

DEFINE

Problem Definition, User Needs, User Personas, Information Architecture

DESIGN

Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design Direction, Mobile Responsiveness

TEST

Evaluating design solutions, Usability Testing, User Feedback, Interactions, Business Feedback

ITERATE

Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design Direction, Mobile Responsiveness

My Approach & Design Process

My approach to the website UX revamp followed a user-centered design thinking methodology, ensuring that all decisions were grounded in user needs and business objectives. The process was iterative and collaborative, involving key stakeholders at each stage:

A. Restructuring the Information Architecture (IA)

PROBLEM:

The existing Information Architecture (IA) was a significant barrier to user engagement and conversion, characterized by an overly complex, poorly categorized structure that did not align with user mental models. A key contributor to this complexity was the overloaded primary navigation. Furthermore, the old footer was extremely confusing and cluttered, rendering it ineffective for users attempting to access crucial information.

MY PROCESS AND SOLUTION:

To address these critical IA flaws, my approach was rooted in thorough research and a commitment to simplifying the user journey for all usersegments. Through heuristic evaluation and Google Analytics analysis (navigation, exit pages, search queries), I identified a high homepage drop-off. My research and analysis predicted user information-seeking behavior and utilized competitive benchmarking to address these issues.

Simplified, User-Centric Sitemap & Navigation
Based on the research, I designed a completely revised sitemap, creating a flatter, broader information hierarchy with fewer levels of navigation. This involved significantly streamlining the primary navigation, reducing reliance on deep L2 and L3 menus, and ensuring clear, concise, and unambiguous terminology for all labels. These changes were paramount in simplifying the experience for all users, including those with lower digital literacy such as elderly individuals and agents seeking quick access to information.
I designed intuitive global navigation menus and implemented sticky navigation. A significant effort was dedicated to redesigning the cluttered footer, transforming it into an organized and easily navigable section for essential links and contact information.
To optimize both user understanding and search engine visibility, I collaborated closely with the Canara HSBC Life SEO team. We refined nomenclature across the website, ensuring labels and content titles were intuitive for users and aligned with high-volume search keywords.
Improved Information Structuring within Pages
Beyond the sitemap, I focused on improving information hierarchy within individual pages using clear headings and subheadings, consistent content blocks, and enhanced use of presets & smart defaults to reduce cognitive load.
The IA redesign laid the groundwork for enhanced search and filtering capabilities, allowing users to efficiently discover specific information.
The redesigned IA was developed with a mobile-first approach, prioritizing essential navigation and content, designing simplified navigation patterns easily operable with a thumb, and ensuring responsive content structure for readability and accessibility across devices.

B. Optimising the campaign-to-landing page experience ​

PROBLEM:

A significant challenge was the suboptimal transition and user experience from marketing campaigns to dedicated landing pages, directly hindering lead generation and conversion. The most critical issue lay with the lead capture forms, which were identified as a primary bottleneck. These forms were excessively lengthy, cumbersome, and lacked any personalization. Crucially, they were designed without considering the user’s position within the sales funnel. The absence of a targeted marketing approach in the campaign landing page design was clearly evident.

MY PROCESS AND SOLUTION:

To address these critical IA flaws, my approach was rooted in thorough research and a commitment to simplifying the user journey for all usersegments. Through heuristic evaluation and Google Analytics analysis (navigation, exit pages, search queries), I identified a high homepage drop-off. My research and analysis predicted user information-seeking behavior and utilized competitive benchmarking to address these issues.

Sales Funnel-Driven Personalization

We embarked on a deep dive into the sales funnel from a business perspective, identifying three distinct user categories:


Top-Funnel Users: Unaware of insurance as a need/concept, requiring a guided journey to understand basic concepts.


Mid-Funnel Users: Possessing a fair idea of insurance but needing assistance to understand which product best suits their specific needs.

Bottom-Funnel Users: Highly aware and ready to convert, simply needing a streamlined process to get started.

I designed templated landing page structures, enabling scalability while still offering a personalized experience based on the user’s funnel stage. This iterative process involved numerous design concepts until a final, unanimous decision was made in collaboration with the business, design, and SEO teams.

  • Dynamic, Conversational Forms: For Top and Mid-Funnel users, I designed assisted, conversational forms that broke down lengthy requests into single, manageable questions. This approach reduced cognitive load, preventing users from feeling overwhelmed and guiding them gently through the information gathering process.
  • Streamlined Forms: For Bottom-Funnel users, forms were designed to be simple, clean, and concise, focusing solely on essential information to facilitate quick conversions.

Each landing page design was tailored to convey insurance information optimally, minimizing lengthy scrolls, especially for mobile users. We ensured strong visual consistency with the overall brand identity and the originating marketing campaigns, eliminating the “broken experience” and instilling user trust. Key information was conveyed within a few scrolls, aligning with mobile-first principles.

C. Redesigning key website sections

PROBLEM:

Key sections of the Canara HSBC Life website suffered from poor usability and clarity, directly preventing users from effectively evaluating products and engaging with critical information. Its initial sections, intended for information gathering and needs assessment, failed to encourage further exploration due to:

  • Clunky and non-interactive insurance calculators with confusing input fields and unclear results.
  • Poorly classified “featured plans” that lacked clear categorization based on target user needs.
  • Product pages that were excessively long, lacked structure, and made it difficult for users to extract key benefits and comparisons, hindering effective product evaluation.
  • Suboptimal customer relations pages, making it cumbersome for users to navigate after-sales service and access essential information.
  • The absence of a dynamic and intuitive search functionality, contributing to overall findability issues.
    These issues collectively created a high cognitive load, particularly for elderly users who struggled with complex interfaces and dense text, and agents who needed quick, clear access to product specifics for client discussions.

MY PROCESS AND SOLUTION:

The entire website underwent a comprehensive revamp, with significant redesign efforts dedicated to key pages including the Homepage, Blog Pages, About Us, Customer Services, Product Detail Pages leading to buying journeys, and Dynamic Search pages. Among these, the following components required the most intensive iterations and strategic understanding:

Homepage Redesign

The initial sections of the homepage were specifically redesigned to be more inviting and conversion-focused. This involved creating clear, visually engaging modules for information gathering and needs assessment. The goal was to encourage users to scroll further and explore relevant content below the fold, acting as an effective gateway to product exploration.

  • Simplified Input & Graphical Results: Inputs were simplified, and the number of clicks to reach the final result was optimized to no more than three. The output was completely redesigned, featuring clear graphical representations supported by concise textual explanations, making complex financial outcomes easily digestible.
  • Personalized Journeys: Recognizing that there were 12 distinct calculators, each serving a unique purpose, I ensured that each calculator had a personalized journey based on its specific use case, providing real-time feedback and dynamic recommendations. This personalization significantly enhanced user engagement and comprehension. 
Streamlined Product Pages with Persistent Navigation
  • Visual Information Hierarchy: To overcome this, I took a visual approach, converting each section into a simplified graphical representation or scannable content block to reduce cognitive load and facilitate easier information access.
  • Sticky Index Navigation: To combat the extreme length of the pages, I introduced a sticky index at the top of each product page. This provided users with an “at-a-glance” overview of the page’s content and allowed them to easily navigate to any specific section without endless scrolling, significantly improving usability and reducing overwhelm. 
Throughout the entire website revamp, the aim was to explicitly weave in a minimalist design aesthetic coupled with simplified access to contact information. This overarching visual and functional strategy significantly aided overall usability by making the content more accessible and creating smoother user journeys across all sections, including the Customer Relations pages and the new Dynamic Search feature.The IA redesign laid the groundwork for enhanced search and filtering capabilities, allowing users to efficiently discover specific information.

Overall Impact of the Website UX Revamp

The comprehensive UX revamp of the Canara HSBC Life website delivered significant improvements across key performance indicators, fundamentally transforming the digital experience for all users and directly contributing to critical business objectives. By meticulously addressing issues in information architecture, campaign-to-landing page transitions, and the usability of core sections like calculators and product pages, the project achieved a more engaged, intuitive, and conversion-focused platform.

Reduced drop-off rates

Immediately reduced homepage drop-off by 15% within three months, with an overall 25% site-wide drop-off reduction from the homepage, indicating enhanced user engagement.

Enhanced user engagement

Redesigned interactive elements, like conversational calculators and engaging product pages, significantly increased user engagement, helping users better understand products.

Improved lead quality and conversion

Optimized campaign landing pages with sales funnel-aware design and personalized forms led to a significant increase in lead capture and quality, agents reported receiving more accurate information.

Elevated user satisfaction and accessibility

A mobile-first, minimalist design ensures a consistent, accessible, and pleasing experience across all devices. Simplifying interactions and clarifying content  made the site more intuitive and efficient for diverse groups.

Stronger foundation for online sales growth

These UX improvements built a robust digital foundation, transforming the website into a more effective tool for online policy consideration and lead generation, positioning Canara HSBC Life for continued digital growth and sales objectives.