Digital Banking Innovation
A large regional bank desired to create a new digital banking product. In a market where digital bank offerings are proliferating rapidly, they needed a clear vision of what would differentiate their offering in a sustainable way. Our team was engaged to apply design thinking in determining what customers would need – or want – from the new product.
Role: Experience Design Lead
Tools: Sketch, InVision
2019
Primary Research
Through Fieldwork, we recruited and interviewed 14 primary research subjects who matched our target profile. Delving into the details of their financial relationships, attitudes toward banking, lifestyle choices, and past experiences provided us with powerful insight into the minds of our target customers and raw data to inform our concept development.
Competitive & Market Research
When looking across the trends in the market we identified four principles that define the evolving expectations of the way consumers want to bank and manage their finances.
Emergent Themes & Unmet Needs
Primary customer research interviews and secondary market research scans allowed us to identify five key themes of unmet needs related to personal finances. We were further able to identify stimulus to be used in a collaborative brainstorming workshop to ideate on how those needs could be addressed.
Opportunity Areas
A brainstorming workshop with 13 client stakeholders and contributors helped our team to align on five initial opportunity areas to solve the unmet needs identified by earlier research.
Ideation Synthesis &
Concept Development
The five opportunity areas resulting from the brainstorming workshop served as the foundation for our concept feature development.
Co-Creation Focus Groups
We evaluated our proposed features and early-stage prototypes with four sets of target profile customers, this time in a collaborative focus group setting. This step in the process helped us reduce the biases inherent in our own work while helping to prioritize the proposed features against feasibility for development.
Final Concept
Our goals for this engagement were not only to create an exceptional experience for the customers; we knew that we had to provide our client stakeholders with justification for our work and the promise that this concept held for the bank and for their customers. This necessitated not only some light branding work, but clearly segmenting the final features in a way that we knew would be feasible for the client to implement in a realistic timeframe.
Concept Prototype
Our final prototype served to bring our concept to life for our client stakeholders and their executive sponsors in a way that was not only engaging, but also clearly feasible, and viable. Per the client’s request, we did not deviate from their native app’s existing styles, navigation, or patterns except when absolutely necessary or when preexisting guidelines did not exist. Although this presented a unique challenge from an IA and UX perspective, it did allow me to be prolific in my output and – most importantly – it allowed the client to clearly envision how our new concept would integrate with their existing products without presenting an overwhelming redesign of their entire digital experience.
Outcome
I wish I had some smoking hot analytics or testing to prove that our concept nailed our goals. And some day I might have such data, but the world came to a screeching halt a few weeks after we wrapped this phase of the engagement. It remains to be seen when – or if – this concept will see the light of day. Regardless, our client stakeholders were ecstatic with the outputs (if not yet the outcome), and for the time being we take that as a win.