Saxo Bank : Trading off options

The format of an information page closes out marketing.

The Site

Saxo Bank, a Denmark-based online investment bank, allows the design of a new-product overview to put a block on marketing.

Saxo Bank promotes its new foreign exchange trading tool, SaxoTrader, in an animated panel on its home page. This links through to a microsite where a promotional video loads and plays on the index page on arrival. A full-page view of the tool’s on-screen trading ‘board’ can be accessed from a picture graphic on the index page.

The view is a page-wide representation with rollover information points (indicated by a magnifying glass icon) that explain key features around the board. Unlike other pages on the microsite there is no space to the right for promotional banners (for the product demo and accounts) and related links. To progress, users must either explore the horizontal navigation bar or return to the index page, which reloads the promotional video on launch.

The Takeaway

Would Saxo Bank design a trading tool and leave off the buy/sell buttons? Quite. Yet here it has produced a marketing page with no obvious call to action or next step for proceeding with the information gathered.

The site doesn’t otherwise lack for online marketing tricks. Other pages, notably those in the product ‘Education’ section, make good use of links and banners to push potential customers to get the SaxoTrader download or free trial-period demo. So the root of the oversight is probably the dimensions of the ‘board’ view feature, which couldn’t be squeezed into the template without losing legibility. Short of redesigning it to fit, a better option would be to launch it in a secondary window so that the index page is readily accessible – and without the irritation of restarting the video.

First published on 16 July, 2009