The problem
Being a traditional bank, we already had an app, but it was quite an old project. It was never improved towards the client, so every client was stuck to that solution for years, with their feedback on it going pretty much nowhere. There was an intent to have the app re-designed, but there was little of a structure to do it right.
Being a traditional bank, we already had an app, but it was quite an old project. It was never improved towards the client, so every client was stuck to that solution for years, with their feedback on it going pretty much nowhere. There was an intent to have the app re-designed, but there was little of a structure to do it right.
The challenge
I was the Lead Designer on the project and was fully aware that we needed to do things a little differently that we did until then, the average age of the bank employees was 47 years old and the average years that an employee have been working there was of 16 years. With this we had a demographic that had habits of another generation and had the feeling that they already knew it all. So, if we wanted to innovate, we needed to reach these people, we needed to show them why we needed to change, we needed to show them that they didn't knew our client as they though, and we needed to make them available to learn and receive new knowledge.
I was the Lead Designer on the project and was fully aware that we needed to do things a little differently that we did until then, the average age of the bank employees was 47 years old and the average years that an employee have been working there was of 16 years. With this we had a demographic that had habits of another generation and had the feeling that they already knew it all. So, if we wanted to innovate, we needed to reach these people, we needed to show them why we needed to change, we needed to show them that they didn't knew our client as they though, and we needed to make them available to learn and receive new knowledge.
The process
As much as everyone expected us to start with designs, we spent around 3 with research and setting up the structure of it. While researching we created workshops within the team with some sketching sessions, card sorting, customer journey maps and user testing (on old app, the one that was live), in order to not only show the process to everyone that wasn't aware that existed, but to reach to them, the idea was to have everyone on board and in the same page. It was indeed as struggle as old habits were difficult to let go, but in the end, we got there. We also created the structure similarly to a product team, as we brought developers from the beginning to be apart of this process as well.
After the initial research and analysis, we started doing some usability testing sessions, mostly presential, with our clients, in order to make decisions based on the data we got. After realising that we didn't had the man power and infrastructure to be more efficient on this regard, we temporarily hired a usability testing company to do it bigger. With all the data, we analysed it, and starting to work from there, bringing everyone to show the process of the work.
The result
This project was the stepping stone to a new way of working within the company, with this, we shifted from waterfall to agile methodology, we made it clear that we needed to keep testing what we were doing with our users, since I had Motion Graphics experience I got to introduce motion within an app that never had seen such, and we did a re-design of the app that really echoed within our users, where the rating and feedback received was a testament that making the right thing, means that you have to do the thing right.
