Home pages are primarily made with the audience of consumers, or more accurately, future consumers, in mind. Users of the website who have already signed up for the service are less likely to visit the home page, and drastically less likely to read through it, because once a user has bought in, they lack the need for such a general overview of features that a home page provides.
The creators of home pages usually consist of a team of UI and UX Designers, working alongside web developers, informed by the needs of brand executives and consumers alike. For some companies, copywriters will make the majority of the text, and video and motion graphics will also be handled by videographers and animators respectively. As a multimodal composition, many hands will be involved in the project before completion.
Consumers range from all walks of life, but within financial technology, a special focus is given to business owners, startup founders, those with a special interest in investing and cryptocurrency, or anyone seeking a future facing alternative to traditional bank accounts.
Home pages can be visited from anywhere nowadays, with smartphones becoming a primary way for people to browse the internet, but with financial technology companies in particular, consumers are more likely to be visiting from desktop computers. This is because most financial technology companies are used by consumers in the context of work, and are trusted with consumers’ money and financial information. Thus, when a consumer hasn’t already started using the service (if they were, they’d likely start on a different page), they’re more likely to come to the homepage from a search engine, on a desktop computer. Because of this, my analysis focuses on the desktop versions of home pages.
The goal of a home page, in all industries, is to capture attention, and funnel customers towards an intent to purchase or sign up for the company’s offered products and services. All elements included in the page must “combine to provide essential information and to form a central message, which should be consistent with other messages communicated by the firm”, with the main imperative being to signal a company’s use to a consumer [10].
While other sub-pages can get into the logistics of the denotative or “engineering” characteristics of the service/product, the home page, being a form of advertising, needs to focus on signaling the outcomes and benefits customers will receive [11]. As the popular marketing adage goes: “People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes.”
Within this overarching goal, the page itself can serve either as the background for the ad, or as the ad itself, with either option requiring different procedures for content organization and complexity [10]. Balancing these needs, as well as the relationship between making content understandable and making content engaging/involved are all priorities of any business’s home page [11].
Finally, for goals that are specific financial technology the cohesive messaging that is found across most companies within the industry shows a focus towards the future, and the technological accomplishments that consumers expect for the future. Think of Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, and his techno-future focus as a representation of some of the ideological and aesthetic directives of the financial technology industry.
Keep all of these goals in mind as we consider the diction, use of rhetorical appeals, layout design, and included content, because they inform the decisions made within home pages.
All brand assets of Stripe, Chime, Square, PayPal, Cash App, and Adyen are cited on this page and within a separate downloadable document. Each asset was acquired either through a Creative Commons license or via press kits, allowing permission for editorial/educational noncommercial use. The entire site was created without template, in Webflow, and exists as a visual representation of the patterns identified and analyzed in the aforementioned companies' desktop home pages.
Home is a genre analysis, not a financial technology company.
1
Stripe | Financial Infrastructure to Grow Your Revenue. Stripe, n.d., https://stripe.com/.
2
Chime - Banking with No Monthly Fees. Fee-Free Overdraft. Build Credit. Chime, n.d., https://www.chime.com/.
3
Power Your Entire Business | Square, Square, n.d., https://squareup.com/us/en.
4
Pay, Send and Save Money with PayPal | PayPal US. PayPal, n.d., https://www.paypal.com/us/home.
5
Cash App - Do More with Your Money. Cash App, n.d., https://cash.app/.
6
Engineered for Ambition - Adyen. Adyen, n.d., https://www.adyen.com/.
7
Geissler, Gary & Zinkhan, George & Watson, Richard. (2001). Web Home Page Complexity and Communication Effectiveness. J. AIS. 2. 0-. 10.17705/1jais.00014.
8
Sutcliffe, A., & Namoun, A. (2012). Predicting user attention in complex web pages. Behaviour & Information Technology, 31(7), 679–695. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2012.692101
9
Doty, P. (1997). Selling the Home Page: An Essay on the World Wide Web and Rhetoric. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 1(3), 99–105. https://doi.org/10.1300/J136v01n03_12
10
Geissler, G. L., Zinkhan, G. M., & Watson, R. T. (2006). The Influence of Home Page Complexity on Consumer Attention, Attitudes, and Purchase Intent. Journal of Advertising, 35(2), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2006.10639232
11
Singh, S. N., Dalal, N., & Spears, N. (2005). Understanding Web home page perception. European Journal of Information Systems, 14(3), 288–302. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000525
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