Method

Visa's Business Solutions website offers their business card owners special offers, services, and products. However, sluggish traffic and little traction with both small business owners and Visa offers merchants proved to be a challenge.

Challenge

In 2007, Visa asked Method to redesign its Business Solutions website. To improve traffic and use, Visa recognized a need to upgrade the site's user experience, making relevant offers easier to find, better highlighting the value of the offers available, and making the entire experience more interesting and in-line with Visa's brand.

Approach

As we familiarized ourselves with Visa's new brand guidelines for the Small Business Division, we also researched the business logic and requirements of the existing form-based system. The goal was to ensure that the interface could capture the needed information and tie in with multiple existing back-end systems for populating and managing the site's content. (As a leading financial brand, Visa has stringent security requirements for any code tying into its systems.) Method designers then brainstormed iconographic concepts for showcasing available offers and helping users find the special deals available in any part of the world, in multiple languages.

Outcome

The final site, the first online implementation of Visa's new brand guidelines, showcases featured offers with engaging localized video clips. Leveraging Akamai's geolocation services and client-side code to detect a user's language preference, the site's visitors are automatically routed to the relevant offers in their country of interest and in their desired language. From this point users can view offers available globally, or dig deeper to find those available only in specific cities. Users can also browse offers by category a dynamic iconic grid that surfaces the number of offers available in each category for that location. Once a selection is made, a new listings page provides videos from Visa's merchant partners, and an attractive and easy-to-read overview of the available offers, with clear instructions for redeeming the offer.

The finished site not only exemplified Visa's new brand language, but extended it, showing how video, clear information design, and dynamic pages can add value for customers - and brand value to Visa's partners.