About This Project
Users
Role on Team
This application allows for a bank’s customers to redeem rewards points they receive from spending to receive cash back, merchandise, travel, and gift cards. This application also has a customer service portal for customer service representatives to assist customers with account issues and an administrative tool for bank managers to set up bank rewards programs and set account permissions.
• Primary audience: Bank Rewards Customers
• Secondary audience: Customer Service Representatives
• Tertiary audience: Bank product and program managers
As the Product Designer, I collaborated with multiple stakeholders including product owners, project managers, and developers to define requirements for, and create an interactive prototype that could be shown to current and prospective clients.
As a Product Manager, I worked on the migrating current clients and the implementation of new clients onto the new rewards platform.
The Problem
The company’s clients, who are banks, want to offer rewards programs to their customers. Their goals are to reward customers who engage with them and encourage them to engage more deeply.
My company has built such sites for other customers and wants to leverage that work to efficiently offer sites to other customers in ways that also satisfy their brand and business needs.
The Strategy
1. Collect and analyze business requirements.
2. Ensure stakeholder involvement in problem framing and reviews.
3. Collaborate with Development to ensure proposed solutions can be built and that design patterns are compliant and reusable.
4. Validate solutions to ensure they work for users.
5. Use all available time to iterate solutions.
Agile Statement
As as client bank with customers, we can offer as rewards program to our customers, so that they are encouraged to use our credit card to make more purchases because of the offers and other benefits they receive.
As a client bank, we can have a site that’s reflects our brand and can be built and maintained at the lowest possible cost, so that the cost of offering the program are low enough for us to make a profit.
As a financial services institution, we want to offer rewards programs to any many of our clients as possible, so that we make more money on our rewards program offerings than it costs to build and maintain the rewards sites for all client banks.
Research
Without access to current users, I gathered data from the first application (from user interviews and surveys) to better understand user’s motivations.
Analysis
User Persona
To help understand who we are building solutions for, I create a persona. This also helps the team gain empathy for the user and their needs. Based on the surveys and data analysis from the first client application, I created an archetype of a real user. I would often refer back to that personal throughout the process as a guide to help make user assumptions.
Heuristic Review
I performed a heuristic review on the application designed and implemented for the first client to evaluate any user flaws. I reviewed the existing application to determine what works well and what may not work well for the assumed persona.
User Journey
To better understand how the existing system works, I created a user journey to evaluate what about the current flow creates friction and what needs to change.
Sitemap (existing)
I like to think of site maps as the road map of your application. It helps to better understand how users will look for information and navigate through the application. I shared the sitemap with the internal stakeholders so they could have a visual representation of the can use the direction the site is heading and ensure all of the functionality from the project requirements document is accounted for.
User Flows (refinements)
As part of the brainstorming session, I may lead an ideation session with the team, or perform the work myself (if necessary) to improve the user’s journey. It’s important to collaborate with product and engineering in this process because the optimal user experience may have to be adjusted to accommodate engineering constraints or other business objectives.
On this project, many of the reward redemption transactions would be handled by a new third-party technology vendor (not the one used for the original application). Our application acted as an “outer layer” to the module they were creating. It was important for me create user flows for all of the redemption flows and then confirm the accuracy with the vendor’s product and design teams.
Design
Sketching
I like to start the design process with paper sketches. to quickly iterate through design options and immediate feedback. It’s also a faster way to communicate and validate design changes throughout the design process.
Wireframes
Next, I created low-fidelity wireframes to help work on a layout and the application’s hierarchy. I don’t get too much into the details of the pages, focusing mostly on 4 major components:
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Navigation
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Page structure
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Content layout
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User flows
Prototype
In my final design, I made sure to address some of our initial problems:
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·Responsiveness
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·Accessibility
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·Customizable components
Testing
Usability testing is a great way to get feedback from real users about the ease and functionality of your application.
Method:
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Remote Tests
Tasks:
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Ask 5 users to redeem points for a Statement Credit
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Ask 5 users to review their transactions for the last 60 days
Feedback:
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There wasn’t enough of a visual difference between the homepage and cashback landing page. Users weren’t sure they had successfully navigated to a new page.
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Users weren’t sure which fields they could edit during the statement credit transactions.
Outcomes
The internal stakeholders were very happy with the final design.
My team won a company award for our work on this project.
I am running demos in sales pitches to current and prospective clients. The feedback has been positive and multiple clients have entered the implementation pipeline.
There was friction between the best user experience for the customer representative portal and administrative tool and current limitations of the current back-end software design. Additionally, many of the back-end software is owned by multiple teams and created in “silos” so the functionality for similar tasks is quite different. It is going to take quite a bit more time and effort to implement this functionality and may require design changes to make the application work around current engineering constraints.