As one of Chase’s first mobile UX/UI designers, I helped re-imagine how people bank. I led UX/UI design on future/innovation projects, like the Chase App for tablet, below. (I also led UX/UI on other, award-winning projects: enhancements to the Chase App for iPhone and Windows Phone; Chase Community Giving; a voice UI banking concept; and more.)
My role: Lead UX/UI designer on a 10-person “SWAT” team of designers, researchers and engineers from Chase and frog design. Working closely with stakeholders, we created an intuitive tablet experience for a robust set of banking tasks. I also participated in a three-month discovery research phase (led by frog) which kicked off the engagement.
This project started in late 2012, ran for 16 months and kicked off just as fin-tech startups like Mint, PayPal and Simple were starting to “eat the lunch” of larger banks like Chase. Our goal was to understand our customer’s needs, the emerging competitive landscape, and envision what the Chase tablet app might look like 3-5 years in the future.
Prior to frog’s research, Chase had been seeing its customers mostly through the lens of “wallet size.” Research taught us to look at, a) how comfortable customers are managing their own finances, and b) how comfortable they are using different mobile devices (which ones, in which specific contexts, and at which time(s) of day). Based on these and other findings, we focused on six content areas:
• Net Worth
• Banking & Credit
• Investments
• Loans
• Payments & Transfers
• Life Planner
After initial research, I delivered information architecture, wire-flows and prototypes for testing. All while working in close collaboration with other UX/UI and visual designers, throughout the completion of the project.
In addition to helping drive the overarching app's interaction design, and helping the Chase and frog designers to collaborate better, I was also responsible for Investments (one of our 6 content areas). Goals for Investments:
• Quickly see which stocks are doing poorly; drill into why
• Quickly see which funds are outperforming mine; look into risks
• See accounts by performance; by winners / losers
• Based on insights learned, transact as required to stay on track
With larger teams, there will be challenges keeping everyone aligned and on track. Daily stand-ups and weekly share-outs helped. Also, clearly establishing roles and responsibilities, early on, allowed decision-makers to weigh in whenever we needed to quickly eliminate options.
Design hypothesis: A robust tablet UX could deepen engagement — in contrast to other bank’s tablet apps which (at the time) offered only “basic” tasks. Customers with a better understanding of their finances would more likely become life-long customers. Also, a robust offering would slow the attrition due to fin-tech competitors.
Once the interaction model settled in, and a visual design system emerged, a lot of thought was given to the visual presentation of customer’s financial data.
Rather than hold off on visuals until the wire-flows were complete, we ran visual design in parallel with interaction design. This is a (frog) best practice which gives the team more ideas to be inspired by.
Usability testing, early and often, steered us toward the most intuitive solutions. On my Investments scope of work: Dashboard interpretation was positive; Portfolio interaction exactly as expected; and Graph interaction also. The image below shows the researcher's view...
Our findings proved that in addition to quick, “basic tasks” (bill-pay, transfers, or mobile check deposit) Chase’s customers expressed a strong appetite for “beyond basics.” The more desirable of these features included monitoring net worth, loans and investments, as well as setting major “life-planning” goals, like allocating funds for college tuition and/or purchasing their first home.
Working on mobile innovation at Chase was a rare opportunity to re-imagine how people manage their finances and plan their lives. This was very inspiring to me.
A well-designed user experience continues to be integral to mobile banking users, and the “better” mobile banking experiences are almost guaranteed to keep customers loyal to a bank.