Freelance Product Designer
(UX & Strategy)
Barclays and ustwo
Banking Mobile Apps iOS
Role: Ustwo London, 2013-2015 (3 year contract). Lead UX on the Barclays iOS App team. Led multiple projects that significantly evolved adoption and usage of their apps, including the Barclays Mobile Banking evolution. Designing features, concepts, new business pitches and supporting leadership team.
Key skills: Design thinking, user research, information architecture, Interaction design, stakeholder management, coaching team, new tools, processes and methodologies (lean UX and agile).
Launched 2015
Project: Mobile Banking Evolution
1. The mission
Led the ustwo design team to rise to Barclays' ambition to significantly increase adoption and evolve the customers' engagement with the banking app. Discover, do more and widen the usage to be more inclusive (accessibility and age) whilst continuing to receive 5 star rating in the App store.
New design, architecture and experience to promote:
Discovering new products (increasing sales)
Servicing banking tasks (cost reduction)
Increasing usage and adoption from a wider inclusive audience - above 50s and those with accessibility needs (reducing reliance on branches and call centres)
I worked closely with key Barclays' Product Managers to drive the new design approach and helped shape the roadmap to ship the most valuable features first.
An inclusive and iterative design approach
2. The approach
I created a time-boxed approach to utilise design thinking, lean UX and an agile mindset. The current audience profiles and their usage was limited to under 40s and mainly checking balances. We wanted to explore a wider audience to be more inclusive and design around their needs and behaviours.
An inclusive and iterative design approach:
Inclusive profiles to cover: ages, abilities and those reluctant to adopt and engage
Prioritise user needs (qual and quant) against business objectives
Iterative prototyping, testing and learning until key assumptions are validated
Work samples
The inclusive personas
Iterative rapid prototyping testing
Baselined the information architecture and design for over 50s
Recognition and setting a new bench mark
3. Outcomes
Launched in 2015. Ustwo and Barclays received significant praise for the new mobile banking paradigm.
Success metrics:
NPS +62
5 star rating on Apple App store
37.5% growth in payment volume
18.3% increase in daily login
84% increase in reporting card lost
56% increase in Direct Call usage
4. Conclusion
By understanding the business objectives upfront we were able to reframe the brief away from cost reduction to being more about an inclusive product that met all customer needs. The experience was based lined at those over 50 (tech laggers) - to ensure they were able to discover and complete tasks on a mobile. We used the best from lean and agile to move at pace. Backed design decisions with qual and quant data. Plus the design was agnostic so other platforms like Android could tweak and deploy in parallel.