Project Brief

Create a welcome experience for new online banking customers highlighting key product features. Make it simple to understand the tools and easy to sign up. Increase enrollment volume and awareness.

Process

Requirements

The concept was simple, but the range of possible implementations was vast. My team started by sitting down with product management partners and brainstorming. Once we found a concept we considered effective and simple, we started writing requirements built around that concept.

Core Principals

Over time as we delved deeper in the design process and worked through the strengths and weaknesses of our concept, we realized we needed a more agile approach. We decided to switch gears, drive the design process around a set of core principals rather than requirements. This allowed the UX team the needed flexibility to explore different designs without running up against process-driven constraints.  It also required tech and product partners willing to give UX leeway to drive out a solution that would be executable and effective.

Iteration

The UX team went through a half-dozen variations of the core experience. We came up with secondary, integrated elements to supplement the initial welcome flow. We iterated rapidly, sharing ideas key leaders, collecting feedback from a wide variety of UX, business and tech stakeholders. The process allowed lots of failure and helped surface our best thinking.

Usability Testing

All along, we knew testing was critical to evaluating our designs. We ran two usability tests, utilizing high fidelity prototypes. As with any usability testing, we learned a great deal. Each test offered key insights that led to significant improvements in our final design.

Outcome

This project had dozens of stakeholders across UX, business and technology teams. I led the team of UX designers and met frequently with our many partners to socialize and review the work over the course of the effort. Our final design tested extremely well with customers and was well-received by all key business and tech partners.

UX delivered finalized wires, specs, and usability findings in late June 2013. A simplified version of the onboarding experience was implemented in fall 2014 and is planned to be more fully implemented in Spring 2015.