Sector: Commercial Banking
Challenge: Identify and design a solution for different customer needs to replace a legacy product that caters to all
My role: Product design lead
Project time: 6 months
The challenge
NatWest Group is the biggest supporter of the business sector — banking around 1 in 4 businesses across the UK and Ireland, from start-ups to multi nationals.
I led a small team of UX researchers and designers to conduct research, facilitate ideation workshops, produce personas, create customer journey maps and plot stakeholder maps to articulate and communicate the vast diversity in user needs. Artefacts were invaluable when considering appropriate design solutions.
Abraham Lincoln once said; “Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”, and this is exactly the mentality we took for this project. Research was the key to a well design experience solution…
Discovery
Bankline was developed during the early 2000s for business and large corporates to conduct banking tasks such as raising and making payments, managing bank accounts, auditing transactions, and managing user permissions.
Despite a solid architecture, Bankline had spiralled into obscurity as it scaled and the user experience around admin tasks such as adding and managing users was particularly unintuitive.
22% of support enquiries were admin related and 33% of those were user management related.
Adding and managing users are not everyday tasks for most customers
User research
Our goal was to understand the diversities of user tasks across different Bankline users. To do this, we wanted to accurately segment the broad customer-base of companies banking through Bankline.
Over a 12 week period, we conducted 2 internal focus groups, 21 user interviews, surveyed 250 admin users, analysed 8 competitors and produced artefacts such as personas and customer journey maps. These artefacts provided focused direction when ideating solutions and supported relaying our research story to senior stakeholders.
The most challenging part of learning about the product was understanding the spectrum of user needs
Customer journey mapping
To ensure we knew the detail and nuances of the manage user journeys, we plotted every step, touchpoint, action, screen, emotion and more on a hugeee customer journey map.
To ensure the journey was accurate, we consulted the team who trains users to use the software, the support teams and other product owners who had worked on features. Initially assuming some of the pain points and emotional state in some sections, we validated or invalidated these as our research continued.
The customer journey acted as a great tool to use with senior stakeholders and helped us prioritise opportunity areas based on the level of friction users were experiencing during those steps.
Validation
Our research had paid off (phew)…
After some ideation workshops, we considered a radical direction; creating pre-defined user roles that were aligned to key user tasks, and a step-by-step add-user wizard for a more descriptive experience. The idea was that each step could inform users what information they needed to provide and why.
We created a couple of prototypes for our first round of testing with participants from small to medium businesses in finance teams of 2 to 5. The additional clarity through the process resonated well with users, however, they were sometime unclear why certain information was requested. After refining with a copywriter, we validated the direction with a second round of testing, giving stakeholders the confidence in the wizard approach.
Participants appreciated that the prototype experience understood their needs
Impact & Takeaways
The autonomy I was lucky enough to receive when planning and running this project gave me the opportunity to demonstrate value through a considered process and work to a timeline agreed with senior stakeholders.
I also learnt the value of taking a calculated risk when we tested a drastically different approach to the existing and competitor experiences. This innovation in reimagining the experience paid off and was founded in well executed research by a highly competent team.
Some key successes of this project include:
⭐️ Pitching the value of a discovery phase to stakeholders
This was one of 3 projects to kick off a mammoth transformation project and introduce new ways of working to the bank. I wanted a slightly larger team and more time than usual to produce a validated, scalable user experience. To achieve this, I articulated it in clear terms, took stakeholders on the journey and my team was able to demonstrate increased value by truly understanding the problem areas.
⭐️ Researching a complex product and user-base
92,000 customers with 400,000 users across many sectors and wanting to accomplish many different financial tasks. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was daunting to begin with, but refocusing customer segmentation on tasks made our lives a whole lot easier — giving us clear priorities to research, design and test for.
⭐️️️ Confidence in validating radical ideas through usability testing
Usability testing can seem expensive and testing radical, innovative ideas can feel uneasy, however, doing it at this stage is significantly cheaper than developing the whole thing for real. This usability testing did just that — validated our radical idea early on, giving us a solution that easily satisfied the goals of this project.
We developed the experience into new branding with an optimised mobile experience, piloted it and will be going live with the majority of customer in early 2023.
Now overseeing 3 other teams working on similar projects, we’re starting to implement consistent research and design processes 🚀
