In the fall of 2019, an international bank looking expand its corporate banking services partnered with Brilliant Basics to envision the future of international cash management. The goal of the 10-week engagement was to create a future vision for a cash management system targeted at UK-based SMEs operating internationally.
As a UX designer, I worked with a multi-disciplinary team of strategists, UI designers, UX designers, a project manager, and the bank's product owners to create a prototype covering specific scenarios provided by the client. Designs were informed by desk research, stakeholder workshops, user interviews, user testing, and client feedback.
The first few workshops (led by strategists) aimed to establish the client's goals for the project. We found that the client, known primarily for retail banking, wanted to attract more enterprise customers. Our clients believed that offering a cash management system for SMEs starting to expand internationally could help achieve that goal. However, to get funding for the system, the clients needed support from senior members of their organization.
Our team worked with stakeholders to map the current customer experience for five user journeys that would be incorporated into the system we were designing. Maps included key tasks, pain points, touch points, and areas of opportunity. This process improved our collective understanding of existing journeys and helped us understand how the separate journeys could work together in a new system.
After mapping out the current user journey for a scenario, our team conducted a co-creation session with relevant stakeholders from the bank and Infosys (dev team). This allowed us to bring stakeholders into the design process and collect ideas that could inform our future designs. During the session, we had each person storyboard solutions and present the ideas to the group.
After going through the workshops for each scenario, the other UX designer and I started drafting a journey that would cover all five scenarios. We soon discovered that this would be too complicated and would take more time than the scope of this project allowed. To remedy this, we worked with strategy team to distill the 5 broad scenarios into smaller, more focused scenarios. These scenarios were then split between the other UX designer and me. My primary focus was sweeps management.
After reviewing the workshop outputs and drafting "to be" journeys, I began to sketch initial ideas. Once I had some rough designs, I shared the sketches with other designers to get feedback that could help refine the designs.
Next, I created wireframes in Sketch based on early ideas. Iterating with digital wireframes made it easier to move elements around and allowed ideas to be presented at a higher fidelity. When I had drafted a few wireframes, I presented them to a designer providing oversight on the project to get additional feedback.
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At first, I presented wireframes to clients in formal meetings once a week. As the project progressed, we realized that one meeting a week was not often enough as waiting for feedback was becoming a blocker. To remedy this, we had two clients work from our office for a few weeks and replaced the formal meetings with informal catch ups. Regular reviews with clients, who where experts in corporate banking, gave us a better idea of how money management processes worked and helped us ensure that designs covered required functionalities accurately.
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Strategists on our team conducted semi-structured interviews and remote usability testing with six users. Testing was conducted later than planned as the bank had trouble finding participants in our target user group (high-level finance executives for SMEs looking to expand internationally). Despite this setback, we were still able to incorporate some testing feedback into our designs. Feedback that involved larger changes was documented so that it could be addressed in the future.
After collecting feedback from testing and many client conversations, I made the final edits to the wireframes. The final delivered wireframes were combined with those from the other UX designer to make one clickable Invision prototype that linked together all of the scenarios.
Once the final changes were made to the wireframes, I worked with UI designers to transform the UX into high-fidelity UI designs. This included (1) explaining the wireframes to designers, (2) answering questions that came up along the way, and (3) reviewing the UI designs to make sure it aligned with approved UX.
At the end of the 10-week project our team delivered workshop outcomes, research, wireframes, high-fidelity UI designs, two videos (one promoting the concept and one explaining our process), and a backlog. The clients shared this work internally, which helped them achieve in buy-in from senior management to further develop the concept. As a result, the client approved additional engagements with Brilliant Basics.
In this project, I learned the importance of scoping work appropriately in the beginning and how to pivot while keeping the client happy if that doesn't happen. In addition, I learned to work collaboratively with UI designers to deliver a vision. In the past I had covered both the UX and UI, so this was new to me.
If I were to do this project again, I would have spent more time trying to understand the whole scope of the project and what was promised to the client before heading straight to design. Doing this could have saved time that was spent designing screens that were out of scope (mobile designs) or removed from the scope after designing started.