How a bank can publish its own website on design
2018 has been an amazing year for us so far. It’s the year we committed ourselves to share our practices with the design community.
In the past years, Societe Generale’s in-house design team (which I am a part of) has grown a lot and worked on an increasing number of services. Since 2013 we have a technical showcase, long before “design system” was even a buzzword. This showcase contained all the code and design assets required to design efficiently a harmonized user experience across our services.
We saw quickly that not only designers and developers were visiting this showcase, but also many Product Owners and Business Analysts — and even curious people from the business. They were also looking for something more than just a bunch of components. Their interest was to learn about our design process globally and more particularly why we were using some of the design methodologies on their projects.
You get people to work with you by caring and by sharing. This state of mind led us through the rethinking of our internal website. Opening it externally made a lot of sense.
It was clear that giving away was the best way to draw people’s attention, and to recruit awesome people—we had in mind the great work of our peers at Capital One, Axa and BBVA. We felt that our principles and stories might interest other people just as we are interested in theirs.
The opportunity & the deadline
In June 2018, we sponsored the Flupa UX day in Paris. On this occasion, we wanted to show our true colors thanks to this brand-new Design website; a public website that would showcase our commitment to provide our users, better interfaces. We presented this idea to our team during our weekly meeting. It immediately was approved and encouraged.
I wouldn’t say “the sooner the deadline, the better” but in this case, the upcoming FLUPA where we’d have UX professionals coming in our stand added just the right dose of thrill to this project.
We gathered with Akram, Lucas, Damien and Morgane and started working on something bold, simple and open. The internal Design website had around 1,000 hits a month. The goal of this new website was to go public, while still keeping the leverage we had on the old website. We opted for a simple MVP with an early version of our new Design System and to fill-in later the “internal content” in a second step for our Agency partners and internal staffs in Societe Generale so they can spread the Design community.
The MVP
I am a UX designer but for this MVP I was in charge of coding the designed interfaces. It was the occasion to try out the new Design System. This first use was a lot of fun, we even found some bugs of compatibility in it, 4 days before the release. A lot of fun I tell you.
We finally got it live right in time and we got great feedback from flupa’s attendants and from our colleagues. We spent the event handing sweets and sunglasses to fellow colleagues and potential recruits. It was really cool.
Developing SG Markets Design was a great experience, it gave me the chance to play around with Github internals pages and issues (we have an Enterprise instance of Github at Societe Generale). I also got to further understand the challenges of our fellow developers… and request some help, again thanks to Github’s collaborative features.
The future
We got help from IT to put in place the infrastructure. They helped us setting up a simple system in React to manage languages, English and French for the moment. We are also making some good progress to the next phase, which consists in more content accessible through a login area for people inside the organisation.
Every single member of the UX team has something to be proud of in this new website, since it reflects who we are, everybody contributed and it gives us a voice to share our Design practice with the community. Going further in the giving away spirit, articles about design are currently being written by all the team, stay tuned to follow how we rethink complexity at Societe Generale.
Thank you for reading !
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🌍 Check out the website : https://design.sgmarkets.com/
📧 Shout us an email : design@sgcib.com
