One bank, four audiences, one structure
Alpha Bank's many microsites had to become one website for very different customers. As the sole designer, I built a single structure that could carry four banking audiences, a loyalty program and a suite of tools, and grow without redesign.
- Solo
- Designer, Linakis Digital
- 2016–2017, about six months
- Four banking audiences
Ermis Silver UI & Usability · Ermis Bronze Corporate Websites · 2019
My role
Solo, hands-on · Designer, Linakis Digital (sole designer on the project). I owned the design of the entire website: information architecture, navigation, visual system, components, tools and the Bonus loyalty microsite. The agency's developers built it; project and account management coordinated with the bank.
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Many sites, one bank
Alpha Bank, one of Greece's largest banks, was moving more of its products and services online. Its content was spread across multiple microsites that had to be consolidated into one, much larger website for four customer segments: individuals, businesses, Gold Banking customers and Private Banking clients. Each had its own products, content, calculators and tools.
The challenge was not one page. It was a common structural language for four substantial banking propositions without turning them into four disconnected websites.
Three entry logics, one navigation
The homepage offered three ways in at once: by product through the main navigation, by need through a selector ("I want to pay my loan", "earn Bonus points") with a recommended product beside it, and by life stage for employees, students and retirees.
The header carried the segments, their categories and the products through a mega-menu. The goal was that people always knew where they were, what belonged to their banking context and where they could go next.
- The mega-menu: segments, categories, products, and where you are
- Navigation by intent: “I want to…”
One skeleton, color-coded by tier
I built a shared page structure across the four segments and used color to group and differentiate them: blue for individuals and businesses (the two public-facing segments), gold for Gold Banking (the premium business tier), and silver for Private Banking (VIP clients). The structure stayed constant; color and imagery provided the context. No segment was allowed to look more premium or more important than another.
- Individuals and Businesses
- Gold Banking
- Private Banking
Designed for the content that isn't there yet
A section might hold two products at launch and ten a year later. For almost every component the question was the same: what happens when the content grows? Cards, sections, navigation, promotional areas and content modules were built to absorb growth without the bank redesigning pages.
The promotional carousel was a framework, not a fixed layout: photography, graphic elements, copy and positioning could change within one composition, across all segments, so campaigns could arrive without a new component.
Bonus: a loyalty ecosystem inside the same system
The Bonus loyalty program was a substantial microsite in its own right, designed inside the same structure: how to earn points, how to redeem them (offers filtered by category and a points-range slider, an A to Z partner index), how to stay informed (news and the member's points balance), major partners with tiered offers.
Tools as part of the site
- The reason for borrowing
- The repayment method
- Recommended loans
A row of service tools: IBAN and Bonus calculators, application tracking, branch finder, complaints, exchange rates. Mortgage, savings and debt-management calculators. A guided solution finder for debt. And Loan Compass, a three-step finder that starts from the reason for borrowing, the repayment method, then amount and term, and ends in recommended loans.
Market indices, share prices with filters and date pickers, and investment charts carried the same visual language into data.
The history timeline
Rather than a static corporate history page, an interactive storytelling experience: archival photography, typography, graphic compositions and motion, with the visual composition evolving as users moved through the decades. It reused the site's principle of combining imagery with graphic elements rather than treating photography as a plain rectangle.
What changed
The work received two Ermis awards in 2019: Silver for UI and usability, and Bronze in the corporate websites category. The bank's feedback after the project was very positive.
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Reflection
The complexity was never in one interaction. It was in making hundreds of pieces, from audiences and products to navigation, tools, campaigns and editorial content, behave as one coherent system.