Heritage Banking

UX Lead | iOS App | 3 Months

Working with a Junior Visual Designer and Product Owner

 
 

How does a heritage bank, with no online services, enter the digital space?

The bank didn’t have online banking as it wasn’t something customers trusted historically or wanted since it only ever performed basic tasks. However, with more millennials opening bank accounts and wanting digital access to their accounts, the bank decided to bypass the usual online banking and wanted to go straight to building a native iOS mobile app. Inspired by challenger banks, they wanted to become modern and create an intelligent personal banking app.

Starting with Customer Research

Focus: One app, many markets

  • User research was conducted across 5 priority markets, identified by the business.

  • In total 62 individuals were interviewed and asked informal questions about their personality and behaviour whilst exploring targeted topics

  • Storytelling was used as a method to get participants to talk about their experiences

  • Task exploration helped uncover channel usage for different tasks, which were then prioritised based on the frequency of use.

The 3 most actioned tasks as user journeys

From task exploration and storytelling I was able to draw out user journeys for how the audience currently completes their banking tasks.

The aim was to understand customer attitudes and baking styles, and how this was evolving, to determine the likelihood of them adopting new digital services.

Personas created to capture and playback to stakeholders what was learnt about customers

The research insights and market understanding were used to create some design principles and to inform brand exploration.

Due to market instability, customers prefer banks that have a strong heritage and are stable and reliable. However, we also need to appeal to the next generation who are native digitals and have higher expectations of a brand’s digital presence.

Rapid Prototyping, Wireframing from a blank sheet of paper to Lo-Fi in just 2 days.

Sample Payments Journey

Design Exploration

I answered their brief with a fresh take on the brand. Searchable transaction feed that allows insight into spending at a quick glance. categorizing transactions and creating expense reports. I also looked into saving goals, which was a big insight from user research and the ability to set spending limits.