Challenge & Research Goals
VUB is the second largest bank in Slovakia, part of the Italian Intesa Sanpaolo group. They had just launched FEJM, a youth bank account campaign built around its own landing page.
The page leaned into highly informal, slang-driven copy to try to speak the target demographic’s language — a deliberate risk that the team wanted validated before committing further to the campaign.
The team needed answers to three things:
- whether young people actually responded well to that tone of voice,
- whether the account’s core incentive (a €30 discount at partner stores) landed as a compelling reason to bank with VUB,
- whether the page explained everything a prospective young customer would need to know.
The obstacle was reaching that audience at any meaningful scale. Recruiting hundreds of teenagers and young adults for research, verifying they fit the target profile, and getting honest feedback on tone and comprehension is typically a slow and expensive process.
Solution
The team used UXtweak’s Website Testing to run an unmoderated usability testing directly on the live FEJM landing page.
Two tasks anchored the study: finding out what FEJM was and what it offered, and finding out who could open an account and how.
Because both tasks lived on a single page, success wasn’t measured by navigation — it was measured by comprehension, captured through a post-task questionnaire mixing open-text and multiple-choice questions.
Pre- and post-study questionnaires added further context: demographic questions up front, and attitude and comprehension questions — including a 1-to-5 rating of how appropriate the site’s tone felt for a bank — at the end. A screening question filtered respondents down to the 15–26 age bracket the campaign targeted (or their parents/guardians).
The team also localized the entire study experience into Slovak, rephrased for a younger audience, and built in an incentive: everyone who completed the study was entered into a prize draw, which was promoted through targeted Facebook Ads.
Outcome
Validated some assumptions, and surfaced real gaps before they became bigger problems
In total, the study drew 446 entries, with 78 respondents (17%) completing it in full — a sample size and speed the team couldn’t have matched through traditional recruitment.
The results were mixed in a useful way. Respondents aged 15–19 responded well to the campaign’s informal tone, describing it as more natural and engaging than typical “administrative” bank language. But respondents aged 20–26 reacted the opposite way, seeing the same tone as undermining the bank’s credibility — a split the team wouldn’t have caught without testing across the full target range.
The discount incentive itself under-performed as a decision driver: testers largely read it as a nice-to-have bonus rather than a reason to choose VUB. And critically, some respondents didn’t fully understand the core offer — including confusion over what it meant to “open a FEJM account and get it boosted by €30” — with several failing to scroll far enough to find key account details at all.
One respondent summed up the tone concern directly: “these phrases don’t belong into the dictionary of the young.”
What it took to get there
- A clear set of hypotheses to test going in
- Tasks and questionnaires built around verifying those hypotheses
- An incentive to drive participation — entry into a prize draw for everyone who completed the study
- Targeted social recruitment (Facebook Ads) to reach the right demographic directly
- A fast turnaround from launch to analysis
Based on these insights, VUB was able to pinpoint exactly where the campaign page was falling short — from confusing offer language to a tone that landed differently across age groups — and address those gaps with real user evidence instead of internal assumptions.
