CommBank App Proposal
Experience design lead on the proposed strategic enhancements on the CommBank App.
Overview of my role
During my time as one of the experience design leads within the CommBank design team I was tasked with presenting strategic design initiatives for the enhancement of Bank's iOS and Android App. These initiatives were to be presented to the executive stakeholder team as possible App upgrades for the first quarter of 2014.
We started off by examining the usage data from the current experience as well as interviewing customers to determine what they needed. From these insights we designed prototypes of the most desired features and tested them. We iterated these until we understood what would be the most desirable product upgrades.
Insights
I partnered with business analysts and customer research to uncover insights and translate them into concepts that address user behaviours and motivations.
Vision
I created wireframes, user journeys and working prototypes to showcase the vision, design principles and content strategy.
Definition
I defined the product, evangelised user needs and balanced business goals. I prioritised and negotiated all product features.
Coordination
I collaborated with numerous engineering teams to ensure that platform requirments could be translated into viable product features.
Leadership
I designed and presented concept work to gain buy‐in at the executive stakeholder level throughout the project lifecycle.
The problem and hypothesis
Rapid experimentation to evolve our App to allow us meet user needs
With over half of the Bank's core customers doing most of their day-to-day banking activities on their mobile devices, much less activity is being spent on the online banking platform. We wanted to explore new strategies.to improve the App experience by giving customers better features to help with their finances.
We examined the features from the online platform and hypothesised ways we could inject the most popular of features into the App while adapting them to our user's mobile behaviours. We rapidly prototyped and tested these with customers to see which of these features would meet their most pressing financial needs.
Discovering our core users
Using data to better understand our customers and their needs.
Our abbreviated project discovery was a high‐intensity effort that allowed the team to quickly review the competitor landscape, understand the business objectives and begin research into user needs, behaviours and pain points while defining and designing the product features.
Additionally, we also kicked off a technical discovery to understand feasibility and constraints. The research revealed that the majority of users wanted the App to be easier to allow them to complete tasks quicker. Users' motivations for these tasks differed, hinting at unique requirements for different segments.
We hypothesised persona types and aligned them to our feature strategy to prioritise whom we would target for the best financial return.
This hypothesis consisted of six different archetypes we used to facilitate discussions about users' needs, desires and varying contexts of use. Through the careful analysis of our research, we identified sufficient behavioural variables to segment our user audience.
These personas became a constant throughout the project and are used as the benchmark in the organisation today.
Activity feed concept design
A easier way for users to follow their bank statements
Better browsing
Allows users to browse bite sized information quickly to determine if it's of interest or warrants action.
Easy-to-use
A straight forward and easy-to-use design pattern to allow for quicker user interactions.
Less is more!
The card based format requires less jargon to inform users enforcing clearer messaging.
Designing the user journey
We hypothesised how key users would interact with the features, then tested these scenarios
Activity feed is a different ways to look at bank accounts
Making it easier to browse
Allowing for quicker user interactions
To ensure users stay on top of their accounts
Or to dive deeper for better financial insights
Financial forecast concept design
Users stay on top of all their money with a forecasted banking feed
Predictive banking
Using the account history the App can predict upcoming expenses to then help users stay on track of their finances.
Smarter decisions
Using this predictive behaviour the App notifies users of more efficient ways to maximise their accounts usage.
Customer centric
This approach helps users to avoid fees and charges to help strengthen the relationship between the bank and them.
Designing the right features
Rigorous design and testing of numerous features to ensure we met user needs
Integrating goal planning into the activity stream to
make it easily accessible
Prompt users to start a goal not open a bank account.
Multiple goal management allows users to get an overview of their financial standing.
Progress trackers help keep users working towards achieving their goals
Celebrate and reward goal achievement
with users.
Financial goal planning
A way for users to plan and achieve their financial goals.
Completion rewards
Financial coaching tips that help users achieve their goals faster while financially rewarding them for goal completion.
Track your progress
Easy-to-use goal setting and tracking that empowers users to set, track and achieve their financial saving goals.
Unlimited possibilities
The App allows users to create unlimited goals that don't require multiple savings accounts and fees to manage them.