Bank of America Profiles & Search
Master’s Capstone, 2014
This was a 6 month capstone project done for Bank of America through the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. We visited Bank of America customers in their homes, talked to them at the branch, listened to them through call centers, conducted a Tumblr diary study and more. Our research lead us to iterative prototyping, testing and ended up generating 3 patents for Bank of America.
Our team of five (team lead, two designers, a researcher, and a front end developer) worked closely with our two Bank of American sponsors and two Carnegie Mellon advisors. As the Design Lead, I created our medium and high fidelity wireframes and collaborated with the rest of the team on research, synthesis, storyboarding, persona development, user testing, and client presentations. Shuang Li and I collaborated on the design of our reports and presentation decks. Our entire process is documented here.
Currently, when it comes to planning for a family, college, retirement or even something as simple as opening a checking account, customers pay a visit to their local bank branch. While this is a win for Bank of America in the brick and mortar space, they also feel like their online channel is not being used to its full potential.
Our team set out to compare the two experiences of opening up a banking account online vs at the branch. We visited people in their homes to learn about their relationship with money and conducted a Tumblr diary study to learn about their day to day relationship with the bank.
We learned that most people don’t think that opening a checking, credit card or even investment account online is an option. They usually have questions and need a bank representative to answer them. We were able to reframe our initial problem: to create an online experience that will make customers feel confident about their financial decisions and provide them with an engaging and seamless purchasing experience.
How might we guide customers through confidently opening an account online?
During our concepting and storyboarding testing, we saw people react more strongly to ideas that met them where they are in their financial journeys. Because of our NDA, we can’t share all the details of our research findings and designs but we can share those that were patented.
What if your bank could help you figure out whether a product is right for you based on information you provide such as:
- Your current bank products (checking, saving, credit, investment)
- Your household information
- Other financial information such as credit history
Customer Profiles and Contextual Search
Customer profiles allow someone searching on the Bank of America site to fill out a financial profile which gives them more tailored search results and therefore helps them find the right product for them.
While a customer can fill out the financial profile whenever they like, they are also prompted during their searches in a contextual way so that they also see the benefit of providing their information.
During our last round of user testing, we gave our participants a survey to fill out about the current Bank of America website and a follow up survey after the session once we had shown them our product. The graph below shows how the values “personalized” and “validated” both nearly doubled, which shows significant improvement.
You can check out the 3 patents we filed here:
