Coffee, Excel and InVision—Inside the Everyday of a Financial UX Designer
Hey guys,
I am Heesu, a UX designer from Seoul, South Korea working now in London. From the moment I visited this city three years ago, I knew I definitely wanted to work in such an international, vibrant and lively city. I am now a financial UX designer in a French bank, Societe Generale, based in the City!
In this article, you can get a glimpse of my daily work life: what I do with whom in which circumstance in our UX team.
8:00 am | Commute by tube from Hammersmith to Liverpool street (and survive from the heat of Central line).
9:00 am | Get coffee and say hello to our team!
9:30 am | Check all the emails and make the to-do-list for the day.
10:00 am | Have a stand-up meeting with a project team in London.
Usually, there is a pizza team for each project: a Product owner, an IT correspondent and a Design correspondent(in this case, myself). So, I communicate a lot with them from the scoping part of the service to its release, after testing and iterations of course. Each service has different type of users, business objectives and schedule planning. So, I need to adapt and guide the project team into our design-led agile methodologies.
10:30 am | On-boarded onto a new project in Paris.
Morgane Peng, our director of UX & Design, is assigning me a new project today! She made sure that the business objectives, the data set and the requirements are well identified before I start the design process. As I need to analyse the work to be done and propose a UX schedule, I learnt to master Excel, as it is a perfect tool to prioritize business requirements and data.
11:30 am | Update my design proposal based on feedback, waiting for lunchtime!
We use InVision to collaborate with other designers within the team, even with other teams and end-users. It’s very efficient to share comments and feedback, so that I can easily iterate and design repeatedly. Especially, when I have a meeting with my project team, sharing the visuals based on the user flow is very effective to communicate between us.
One of my recent projects was a global platform for all Societe Generale employees. Axel, the product owner, was in Hong Kong and Elijah, the developer, was in New York. Although we were all over the world, communication with Skype and InVision went really well!
12:00 pm | Go to Spitalfields market next to the office and choose today’s lunch. Bon Appétit!
1:00 pm | Come back to my desk and continue to design, design, design!
Personally, I really like this part! As a financial UX designer, I need to understand the workflow of users, who are experts in Finance, and visualize it into design. I usually like to draw some wireframe sketches or design high-fidelity prototypes to visualize the workflow step by step from the perspective of users.
2:00 pm | Go to a conference room for the weekly UX catchup with the other UX designers of the team in Paris.
Our UX team is a pool of expertise, based in London and Paris. Every week, we share what we do in each project to grasp the whole view of our products and talk about UX trends. Sometimes we raise UX issues, discuss them thoroughly and come up with an agreement to keep consistency across all services. Also, we have our own Design System, shared by all the projects. So, I can steal the use cases from a previous project of the team to benchmark and reuse.
3:00 pm | Do a user test of what has been developed.
Designing the visual screens is not enough! I need to review the UX/UI of the service after it is developed and even after it gets released. A user testing is critical to improve the user experience, so we usually plan it in advance with the pizza team. Implementing a user testing strategy appropriate for financial users is also one of my tasks as a designer.
5:00 pm | Chat quickly on Skype or Symphony with the product owner and the developer to clarify a few things.
Crafting financial services is not just about visual design. I have to consider carefully which problem I should solve, from where I should start, and for whom I design it. So, I need to understand the business and technical matters, while designing. I feel that the more I communicate, the closer I am to my users!
6:00 pm | What a busy day! Time to go back home!
See you tomorrow! À demain!
