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Role: Lead Product Designer
Duration: Two Week Sprint
Client: Suncrest (Conceptual project)
Team: Jeovanny Tovar & Kathryn Robbins
Overview: Over the course of a couple of weeks I undertook UI and research challenges daily with my team to create the best experience possible for our users. Some things we wanted to understand before going into research were, how can we make users feel trust in our company when handling their finances and getting to the root of what users look for when deciding on which bank to choose from with so many options available.
Assumptions entering research:
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Gen-Z has poor financial literacy skills
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Gen-Z and Millenials desire technological efficiency
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Gen-X and Boomers want technological simplicity
Goals before entering research:
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Learn how often users enter the application​
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Learn why users enter the application
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How they think about financial literacy
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Which features are useful and which are unhelpful
Insights gained from user research: Banking to most users is more than just a transaction. Users want a human-centered experience based on transparency and trust. However, they feel the app is super convenient for paying bills, checking balances, and transferring money. Lastly, Gen-Z’s don’t use the app as much partly because they feel a lack of education on banking jargon.
Affinity map takeaways:
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People want to feel like they still matter, and have good customer service.
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Education on banking jargon is (somewhat) important
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Users want an app that’s easy to use and can get simple tasks done easily
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People trust in family and friend referrals when deciding on a bank
"I wish I could have customer service support anywhere."​
"Most bank applications are hard to use and understand."
Users pain points:
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Baby Boomers and Gen-X implied that the banking experience was poor,
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the younger generations feel a lack of understanding of banking jargon and therefore feel turned off to the idea of banking
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Lastly, they feel a lack of good customer service.
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"Sometimes they use words I've never heard of before."
"I often don't understand something that's happening in my bank account but i'm too embarrassed to ask someone."
Our research proved that while our assumptions and goals were considerations for users, they didn’t align with the pain points users were facing currently. So we wanted to make an app that educates and gives them a sense of customer service to help users by rebuilding trust between them and their bank.
Meet Rebecca
How might we help Rebecca? After creating the persona my team and I came together to collaborate on different ways we might be able to help Rebecca with some of her frustrations. During the stage of ideation, we came up with some features to solve the pain points of users based on our HMWs. Here are some bullet points we came up with.
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Question: How might we offer Rebecca customer service
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Solution: A chat feature to give users customer service and support, available during all hours of the day.
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Question: How might we create an app that educates Rebecca & offers transparency with her account status??
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Solution: A help Icon to help educate the user on topics.
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Solution: We wanted to give users the transparency they were longing for by fixing the layout to help them quickly get knowledge on their account details (e.g. where their money is/goes & have easy access to information like transactions.)
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User flows: After we conducted our ideation session we were able to make a two user flow of our users using our MVP features. Here is what we came up with...
User Flow 1: Account Details
User Flow: Appointment Request
Style guide: After creating our user flows I was able to create our style guide based on our client's preference, for the next steps
Designing & testing: Thereafter we were able to continue onto the next steps, which is designing, the fun part! Here are some takeaways from the usability test from our grayscale prototype.
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Some questions were hard for users to understand. So we needed to be more specific with the words we chose.
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We used to have a “temporary username” function for new users but quickly realized that wasn’t something people were used to. They seemed to be more acquainted with a temporary password instead.
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We needed a color that stood out to users while going through our app to redirect their eye to where we want them to land.
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We also had to fix some screens that were acting up in regards to the prototyping
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Users wanted it to say “chat” under Anna feature so they knew they can interact with it
Mockup after implementing changes needed:
Lessons learned:
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The most important thing I learned in this project is humility, It's so important to humble yourself with your teammates. It makes it easier to see their perspective even if they aren't 100% correct. You can always apply some type of critique even if you don't agree with everything they said.
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It's also so important to make sure you and your team are having fun. Take some time to let go with them. Make work activities exciting and something to look forward to. Not only will the final product come out better but it will build a great work relationship with your workmates.