One of my favorite job duties is conducting stakeholder interviews as part of our credit union website redesign process. We interview credit union staff in various roles, listen to their perspectives on what is working or not working on their existing website, how they use the website internally, and where their members are getting hung up. The idea is to reflect back what we hear, make sure we got it right, then take those learnings and incorporate what we can into the new website.
One common concern I hear is something along the lines of: “Why can’t they see that [apply, make a payment, login, etc.] button? It’s right there!” They report that members then end up calling or coming into a branch, instead of taking the intended action right there on the site.
I tend to answer that question with a question: “Why do you think that is?” At this point, I have familiarized myself with the existing site in advance, usually through a website audit, and the person I am interviewing has likely been interacting with the site on a daily basis, sometimes over the course of many years.
But conducting a website audit as a third-party partner, or interacting with a website as an employee, takes place in a specific context. How and when do members and prospects interact with the website? What is their current state of mind? Are they on their phone and in line at the grocery store? Are their kids peppering them with questions in the background? Is it 9:30pm after a long, stressful day that included a brutal bus commute across town? Are they making a financial decision as a response to something big or even traumatic that happened in their personal life? What if English is not their first (or even second) language? These are known as “stress cases,” aka Life. Just as I am not at my best when I’m hungry, our members face life scenarios that may make “obvious” tasks challenging. Acknowledging these stressors helps us approach them from a state of empathy.
The next question becomes, then: Ok, so what are the barriers? What can we do better? How can we improve their experience? What are we missing?
If we continue to plow forth with what we think folks need and what we think they should be able to do, or even what is in their “best interest,” we’re missing out on the absolute most important opportunity in this effort—including them.
As we have moved through our own cooperative journey at PixelSpoke, we have started spending more time lately asking these questions. What of our system is working, or not? And if not, why not? What has changed in our circumstances, as individuals, a company, a cooperative, and with the world around us? What opportunities have our collective “stress cases” illuminated?
After all, our entire country and economy was intentionally designed and built upon the labor of humans who had no agency. Some human beings were seen not as humans, but as lines on a ledger—spreadsheets of yore that divorced humans from their humanness and turned people into transactions. We are still healing from those wounds, and continue to reinforce behavior and activity under the assumption that people should be able to navigate it. They are set up to fail, so it should not surprise us when they do.
So, when we pause and ask ourselves the questions about what we want to build next—everything from a website to our entire economy—it's critical that we involve the people who will be most affected by the decisions we make now. Otherwise, we end up in the same situation, wondering, once again, how we got to this place.
I recently had the honor of participating in a panel discussion about employee ownership at the B Corp Champion’s Retreat in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hosted by Project Equity. There was palpable energy and momentum around taking the idea of “business as a force for good” and extending it into models that provide more agency to the individuals that make up the businesses we run. Imagine an economy that is intentionally designed (this time around) not just by the people at the table, but at a much larger table! The response from the audience was so positive, we also followed up with a webinar, including time for questions, and extended offers for more follow up.
I have noted in my own experience with this effort at PixelSpoke that collective decision making does tend to take longer. It can sometimes feel frustrating when we have a million things to do and just want to “get to the next thing.” But this added time can actually be a gift. The characteristics of paternalism and urgency are part of the fuel that creates long-term frustration at work and in our communities. What members or prospective members are we losing to a large, anonymous (and sometimes fully online) financial institution because of the friction someone experienced with us? Folks don’t always tell us why they are frustrated—unless we ask. Sometimes they suffer in silence, or just walk away. Choosing to slow down interrupts past patterns that haven’t served us well. In the face of our fast-paced modern society, creating space for these pauses offers a much-needed and welcome alternative.
In a recent episode of our Remarkable Credit Union podcast, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer Christin Vaughn at Allegiance Credit Union, shared how they spent years focusing on community organizing, policy changes, and deep relationship-building to lay the foundation for their new brand, Alianza, designed with the local Spanish-speaking community.
Notice they designed with, not for. Christin said, “It was about not assuming we knew what the community needed, that translation alone was enough. The mindset shift was, "Don't market to people, build with them." So we have just kept the community involved the whole way and let that shape everything from the name itself to the branding to the actual products we offer. And that doesn't mean that we've gotten it right the first time every time, but by starting with that listening first, hiring from within the community, letting their voice shape everything, that's what's helped us remain authentic.”
Going back to that button that some of our visitors aren’t finding as easily as we expect—the solution is to ask them. Do user testing. Iterate. See what works and doesn’t work. Ask again. Meet your members where they are. Sometimes it’s not about the placement of the button; rather, it’s about a member who doesn’t trust online application forms or would just prefer to speak to a human being.
When we collectively overcome barriers that may seem so simple, we can thoughtfully, intentionally help preserve the credit union movement as a way of improving the financial lives of our communities. We can help make a cooperative approach the default, not the exception. Things do move quickly; technology can own our time; it can be hard to keep up with fintechs with seemingly unlimited resources. But by listening even more closely, and by building something that is done with people, rather than for them or to them, we play smarter, not harder.
