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Mapping member minds for better CU website navigation

Your credit union website’s navigation has to match your members’ mental maps so they can easily find their way around your website. The “right” answers can vary quite a bit between credit unions, but overall it’s well worth spending time, thought, and testing to make sure people who aren’t credit union employees can find their way around your CU’s website.

Here’s how to understand the nuances of mental maps, and use this information to build natural, easy to use navigation with just enough redundancy to be helpful.

Structure around people, not your org chart

Look at your search data, your Analytics, do some live testing, and most of all lean on your member service experience to structure navigation around the ways YOUR members think about things. And of course stir in your product strategy and priorities.

For example, some credit unions lump all “vehicle loans” together, including motorcycles, boats, and RVs. They’re all secured vehicle loans, and the loans work about the same, so that keeps things simple and makes the most sense for their members and their lending strategy.

But for other CUs, it’s worth separating these products onto their own pages, especially if loans for recreational vehicles are more of a keystone product. In different parts of the country (especially more rural areas), or for different types of members, boat loans, UTV loans, or even airplane or snowmobile loans, may be especially popular, and so you want to make sure you’re top of mind for members.

Redundancy is fine and OK

If there’s more than one possible answer for where a product or service belongs in the navigation, then there’s nothing at all wrong with putting it in more than one place.

Here’s an example on a website we built recently for Sacramento Credit Union: https://www.sactocu.org/
Note how credit cards are under both “Bank” and “Borrow”; it turns out that in the Analytics data and testing, a lot of people didn’t quite think of credit cards as a loan product, and looked for them under “Banking” products.

Obviously, you don’t want to go overboard with this and clutter up your navigation, but some well-chosen redundancy around real-world mental maps can greatly improve usability.

Variety is the spice of content

Is your CU’s bread and butter called a car loan, auto loan, vehicle loan, car note, truck loan, or minivan loan? Or do you hear all these and more on a regular basis? People in real life use a variety of words and phrases for the same concepts, so it’s important that you do as well.

Don’t insist on only using a term like “vehicle loan” or you might genuinely confuse people looking for car loans. AI-powered search engines are doing a much better job with semantics and knowing these are the same things, but in the end people are the ones who have to decide the result is worth clicking. And yes, some folks genuinely don’t quite understand that a “car loan” can be used to buy a pickup truck.

Keep navigation tiers consistent

It’s quite common and helpful to have two tiers of navigation, but it’s important to keep their usage consistent. For example, we often build sites with an “Action” tier and a “Products and Services” tier.

Here’s a good example from a website we recently updated for Park View Federal Credit Union: https://www.pvfcu.org/ The top bar is all about shortcuts to the main things people want to do (actions) on a credit union website. It’s a blend of what people most often need (Locations & Hours, Rates, Search), and the strategic priorities of the credit union (Open an Account, Apply for a Loan, Appointments).

And the “main” navigation level is all about products, services, and information. The main thing here is to keep the functions of each tier clearly separated so that members can easily understand the “map” of the website. You’re also relying on the fact that people have been using websites for a few decades, and have been “trained” to quickly understand this kind of structure; it’s more or less a standard way to structure navigation.

Tinker and try

This tip is simple: don’t set your navigation in stone. Make sure you have a flexible navigation system and that you’re willing and able to experiment with wording and placement to improve the experience for your members. Use heat mapping and replay analytics to figure out where people struggle and where they look for information.

At the same time, keep it as simple as possible. The human brain can only juggle about six or seven things at once, and so if you keep adding items to your navigation you might risk making things too confusing. Consolidate and simplify where you can instead of just adding more and more.

There’s more than one right answer

There are many ways to structure a credit union website’s navigation. But if you keep your members’ minds in mind, and you’re willing to experiment, you’ll figure out what’s best for your members.

Brian Wringer
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