BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, DESIGN: BUILDING THE THIRD PILLAR
Creating a one stop shop commercial banking experience while simultaneously creating a design practice for a global bank.
The Problem
Commercial banking clients are experiencing paper-heavy and disjointed experiences across their interactions with the bank that typically require one-on-one phone interactions with their relationship manager.
The Solution
Design a one-stop-shop commercial banking platform that unifies their entire banking experience onto a single digital platform.
My Role
I was the lead researcher and design manager across a large, blended design team, responsible for the UX design strategy and the research program. I oversaw the UX and design work, defined & implemented the design process into scrum teams, & managed design governance and strategy with stakeholders.
Research & Discovery
As part of our product discovery process, I led a series of co-creation sessions with internal stakeholders and external clients to uncover the relative value of each feature. First, I ran design thinking workshops with internal SMEs to understand the relative importance of each feature against their perceived difficulty to implement. Leveraging this feature set, I then led a series of user interviews with clients mapped to pre-determined personas to validate the value of each feature. This research was then used to inform the roadmap for our MVP.
Sample readout of research findings
Sample readout of feature prioritization
Design & Delivery - MVP
Moving into delivery, I oversaw a team of UX and visual designers who were responsible for supporting the business teams in defining the user journey of each workstream, creating the UX wireframes, conducting user testing, and creating visual designs for five parallel workstreams. It became clear quite early on that the agile delivery process and how design played a role was unfamiliar to the organization. I then led a series of presentations to leadership and scrum teams on the importance of UX design & how to best integrate designers into the delivery process. An important aspect of these conversations was highlighting the importance of aligning the right design skillsets to the right roles and ensuring we had enough designers to cover the ambitious goals for delivery.
Sample sketches
As part of ongoing delivery of the UX design, I created a research plan to support ongoing co-creation and validation of designs. This included a between and within-subjects mixed design approach to provide substantial feedback on cross-journey design patterns and workstream-specific hypotheses. Unfortunately when Covid hit, client research was put on pause. Adapting to a new normal, I created a new research plan leveraging internal SMEs as proxy-users to continue the feedback loop. The feedback from these sessions were then iteratively fed back into the scrum teams to refine the experience, ultimately delivering our first MVP.
Adapted research strategy
Beyond MVP
After a successful delivery of MVP, our stakeholders wanted to accelerate the product’s capabilities, tasking the team with additional features to a total of parallel 10 workstreams and global expansion to two additional geographies. Due to the increasing demand & leadership recognition of the importance of experience design, the design team expanded from four to twelve designers across two agencies and an in-house team. I was entrusted by the client to create a design governance strategy across the team to ensure we had the right roles and coverage across the demand. This strategy included workstream and task management leveraging confluence & JIRA, defining proper meeting cadences to enable collaboration & communication, defining and aligning our design principles with the larger brand, and refining the design process within each scrum team, and aligning designers to proper design roles. The results of this strategy has enabled smoother delivery, ability for predictive planning of design efforts, better cross-workstream consistency, and an elevated user experience.
Leadership roles & responsibilities
Design workstream roles & responsibilities
Design sprint process
Design RACI