Image credit: Newcastle Permanent
The team bolsters its numbers by partnering with ARQ group and Xam consulting to bring their MVP to life and deliver their customers a mobile banking experience that is:
My Roles:
Researcher, UX Designer, Usability testing, Quality Assurance tester, System Documentation, Contribute to Design Ops
Lead the design payment flows and auxiliary functions
Team Size
Why Showcase This?
This project demonstrates my ability to design, validate and deliver core product experiences. I led the design of the payment flows our customers used to complete 250,000+ monthly transactions.
Personal Workload Breakdown
Tools and Tech
Features I Designed
Smart. Simple. Secure.
Photo by İrfan Simsar on Unsplash
To be smart we need to be well informed.
To understand what good looks like on the global banking landscape I used the 11Fs-Pulse platform to access documented in app journeys from fintech around the world.
Cataloguing our findings and comparing the features, design decisions and information provided during core journeys such as login, dashboard, payment flows and transaction history.
I catalogue the same attributes from the domestic market as we did in the international research and note the emergence of cloud native banking platforms such as upbank and 86400 (now ubank).
I research what industry bodies expect to see in leading digital banking solutions. Their criteria was used to inform and our feature roadmap. Canstar provide a link to their methodology and score weightings for functionality, Research and Application, Payments and Transactions, security and support.
As an institution with over 250 thousand customers we have an pool of feedback, wants and wishes to draw from. We audit and record our app store reviews for both IOS and Android to identify the current biggest pain points and wants of our customers segments that use the current mobile app.
Our relationship with the in house phone support and email teams to understand the improvements we could make to reduce their recurring issues and costs while improving our customers experience.
Combining our app store data with the support teams data allowed us to
A) Map what is within our control improve
B) Inform the roadmap
C) Inform specific journeys during their redesign in the MVP
65 - 35
Qualify for home loan?
Yes
Actively banks with us?
Yes
34 - 16
Qualify for home loan?
No
Actively banks with us?
No
15 - 1
Actively banks with us?
No
Actively banks with us?
Passively
* Approximate percentages
Newcastle Permanent has consistently led the industry in customer satisfaction and low-interest rates however, the lending criteria to secure a home loan has been far more conservative than its competitors.
The impact of tight lending policies and high satisfaction saw our customer segments skewed dramatically.
Groups that have spent enough time in the workforce to secure higher incomes and home loan finance with Newcastle Permanent were also largely responsible for advocating and opening youth accounts for their younger family members.
Retention of young account holders plummeted when they entered the workforce.
Segment ages 16 - 35 stated their reasons for leaving or not banking with the Perm as:
Wanted greater access to their cash.
Our ATM network is very localised
Desired a more modern banking experience
Current app is dated, flakey and lakes features
Easier to secure a loan with other banks
Despite originally applying with the Perm
At the time both ING and UP app designs didn't provide customers with a dashboard view of all their accounts. In stead, they had simplified the experience to swiping between full-screen views of each account. So if both UP and ING shared this design pattern why didn't we? DATA.
The vast majority of our active customers had more than two accounts and a dashboard list allows customers to
A) See an overview of their total position across all accounts
B) Provides faster access to all accounts
C) Provides a home location for the app
The final design places the account level view into a bottom sheet that transitions up from the bottom of the screen after a customer taps on an account. This allows us to
A) Hide the load time with motion
B) Make it feel like you never left the dashboard
C) Provide an easy exit to all your accounts.
Smart is providing customers what they need, when they need it. To achieve this I looked at our current apps usage data to determine usage rates which informed decisions around ordering of list items and options along with screen orders in payment flows.
Payments ordered according to usage rates data
Payment steps and information echoed back to customers in the exact order and terminology used when completing each step
Presenting payment scheduling as an optional extra at the end of each flow brings consistency to all payment types
Simple is decreasing cognitive load during tasks, to do this I adopted a progressive disclosure pattern during the payment flows. Dividing payment flows across multiple screens allowed me to emphasis important information on each screen.
Minimum content on each screen
Oversized amount input for easy, confident input
Displaying previously entered data allows recognition over recall
Correct number-pad for input type
We approached security at a global level for this project so many core security features were baked in. My approach to security when designing new flows was to always provide the lowest risk design solution and put it before the team for feedback and negotiation if we wanted to increase ease in exchange for security.
Provide security advice and do the work for the customer
Provide the user friendly device name for recognition
Last log on stamp increases personal security and allows customer to prioritise action
Deliberate multistep actions are required to remove a device to confirm the correct action is being taken
With delivery management most concerned with budgets and timings the project goal set for this round of testing was to benchmark the MVP against the SUS score.
I used lookback to personally interview 5 participants to learn how our customers perceived the MVP. Each of the five interviews covered 5 topics of
This allowed us a better understanding of participants preferred channel, the other institutions they compared us against, their app usage and perception of our organisation.
App freezing is common
Apple pay is highly desirable
Swiping to navigate is desirable
Marketing content was to dominant
Layout and spacing was nice
Some language was confusing
Easy to navigate
>80.3 is considered an excellent Adjective Rating
This topic allowed us to confirm participants expectations of osko payments and confirm our design decision of defaulting all pay anyone payments to use OSKO real time payments.
Questions such as "what do you like the most about our current app" and "what do you dislike the most" gave us some insights on what we could pay more attention to during the MVP build.
During the usability testing participants used a high fidelity invison prototype I had created to express their reactions, feelings and thoughts on the following app features and journeys.
Dashboard (logged out and in states)
Account level view
Searching transactions
Transferring funds between accounts
This topic invited frank feedback with questions such as
"If you could talk to the developers/designers and give any other feedback, what would that be?"
and
"If you could talk to the developers/designers and give any other feedback, what would that be?"
At the end of the session our participants were asked to score the MVP on a standard system usability scale.
I collaborated with team members to create a 15-question survey to embed in our MVP. The survey served as both a form of tree-jack testing and a closed card sorting exercise. We also provided customers the ability to vote on the order of the items in the app's navbar and their preference of light or dark UI.
Questions
Customers completed the survey
Partially completed the survey
Heat maps serve as a limited tree-jack test to gauge how accurately and directly customers were able to find what they needed. Here are some of the questions we asked.
You’ve lost your card. Where would you go to block it?
Where would you go to increase your payment limit?
You need some help. How would you contact us?
230 responses
230 responses
231 responses
I found this response most provocative. Given the lack of cohesion in customer responses We must make sure this feature is found in a multiple applicable locations. Backlog items were created.
For question 12 we invited customers to drag and drop the names of features together into the groups that made the most sense to them. This allowed us to asses the accuracy of our information architecture
Groups scored 90% or greater
Groups scored less the 50%
The term "digital wallet" caused continuous confusion during the MVP build and was scheduled for rework based on the language customers used after it had been explained to them.
Digital wallet
What's new
Feedback
Current app version
Terms and conditions
Transaction alerts
The diverse groupings in the groups of what's new and terms and conditions may indicate customers are expecting to find this information in context to their location.
example:
I expect to see terms and conditions when exploring new products
The grouping results for transaction alerts required more investigation but indicates customers are looking for transaction alerts at both the account and channel level while also expecting to receive the alert in a formal manner such as mail.
Travel notifications indicates a diverse preference of how customers would like to inform us they will be overseas. Ideally we would match their expectations to improve their experience.
Vendor selection process and execution
The difference a talented and dedicated UI specialist can bring to a team and project
How to create, maintain and implement a copy register
Accessibility testing needs to be done during general feature QA
We needed to demonstrate responsive builds and designs rather than talk about them as design and dev used the same words but missed the intent of some communicaitons
Affinity mapping with stakeholders to inform a roadmap
