SME banking app
A banking mobile app for business owners
Role: Senior UX Designer
Company: The Co-operative bank
Team: Business - Mobile
Context
The bank had a mobile app for retail but needed one for business, more precisely for small and medium-sized enterprises. Bankify was the name of a startup in charge of building it. They were going to use React.
Challenges
It needed to be designed from scratch and there was little to no data to rely on. Daly, the bank design system, was being created and not all the components and patterns in it had been fleshed out.
Actions
At the start of the project I worked closely with a Service Designer in my team. Together we planned and ran sprints for the senior stakeholders (legal, risk and fraud) to take part in them. We ran a sprint for every journey and screen that needed to be conceptualised and designed: registration, sign in, dashboard, transactions, payments, navigation and help. We kicked off each sprint by going through a competitor analysis and facilitated the discussions stakeholders had. At the end of those sprints we produced rough sketches on post-it notes for all the screens and that was the starting point for my work.
After we completed the sprints I dedicated most of my time to the designs on Figma whereas my teammate focussed on the relationship with stakeholders to make sure they followed and approved every single choice we made. I outlined the designs by drafting the layout, the copy and the UI. I then worked with a Content Designer to review the copy. I did everything iteratively and regularly asked the whole UX team for feedback. The Design Researcher in our team helped us organise and run usability sessions throughout the project.
My aim was to make the best use of UI components and styles in Daly, the bank design system. Because Daly was still work in progress I found an opportunity to do something useful for both the design system and the app. I designed some new UI components and created the art style for our icons and illustrations. In order to have the art style approved I reached for the branding team and worked with them until we were both happy with it. In Daly I defined the rules for our icons.
Results
When all journeys and designs were in a good shape and most decisions were taken my teammate moved to a different team. Because of the smaller workload I kept working on the designs and I also managed the stakeholders throughout the final stages of the project.
