I shaped and lead the UI and UX of our Open Banking platform from conceptualisation to a live product with paying customers. Our product enables businesses to gain access to valuable Bank API data which they can then ask their customers to consent to. Consenting allows these businesses to offer tailored products based on their user's expenditures and provide new payment journeys which cut traditional card fees and speed up the conversion process.
At its core, open banking enables third-party payment and financial service providers access to consumer banking information. Industries can gain access to their customer's information to be able to understand their expenditures and tailor their experiences
Below demonstrates how industries can plug into our dashboard to gain access to secure bank APIs. The banks send this information back to the business, enabling them to see a better picture of their customer's expenditures.
The attached diagram showed how we approached tackling many major journeys, whether it would be creating a new journey or having to user's and users' consent journey. A design sprint was conducted well in advance of any developer handover to ensure enough time was had to empathise, define and then test out solutions before beginning development.
Working in a multidisciplinary scrum team. I assisted the developers and QA testers during the development and deployment stage to ensure my designs were matched to the live product.
The main purpose of this focus group research was to draw upon respondents' attitudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences and reactions in a way which would not be feasible using other methods. We used the same participants to continually iterate and test throughout the design process.
Initially, we presumed that we would find out what people like about current platforms so that we could ensure that our own product facilitated the main features that current users like in a bid to create something that facilitates all these liked features.
We soon realised that there was a lot of frustration around even the most simple of journeys and it was because of this we ended up focusing more on their user experience and pain points in the follow-up sessions.
This change in our approach to follow-up focus groups enabled us to uncover of new features that we originally didn't think to implement. A key example is the white labelling functionality.
Affinity mapping was also used to group the different pain points and insights we got. Once grouped we were then able to begin creating flows and present them back to our participants either remotely or in person.
Alongside Affinity mapping, we sorted what they were Saying, Thinking, Doing, and Feeling into an empathy map, we did this to be able to refer back to when tackling future problems.
Following empathising with our potential users, by conducting interviews and focus groups and ethnographic studies of how they use their current consoles. We were able to create personas that represented the different roles of users and their different pain points and objectives.
We wanted to be able to use these personas to refer back to when solving future problems.
• Who is experiencing the problem: CTOs, developers, product owners, and designers.
• What is the problem: Based on the observations we made during the empathise phase, we wanted to have common themes with the different problems that arose, not just being reactive to individuals.
• What task is the user trying to accomplish, and what’s standing in their way with their current platforms?
• Where does the problem present itself? In what situation or context is the user in when they faced the problems raised?
• Why does it matter? Why is it important that this problem be solved? What value would a solution bring to the user and the business?
"Integrating open banking is technically a nightmare, the current platform we use seems as if it has been built purely for functionality. With no real empathy to the user. What seems like a simple journey on the face of it can quickly turn into a complex task."
It was clear that a-lot of the main user journeys for a potential user needed to be simplified and made visibly easy to complete, from my end I wanted to ensure the console aesthetically and functionally made the user's lives easier when dealing with very technical information. A user first approach drove all my decisions and i ensured my team did the same.
It was important to create flows and approve them before beginning to design. Below is an example of us breaking down the important user journeys to tackle first.
Below is a snippet of the sort of journeys we created when building out the initial MVP. Due to the ever-changing nature of the Open Banking world. Many more flows were built out to accommodate the growing backlog of features that we wanted to build based on user feedback.
Before beginning any development, I would create low-fidelity designs to present back to the team, working with the developers to ensure it fulfilled the necessary technicalities for an end user to be able to create what they needed.
When available, I would work with potential users to test the user experience of core flows using higher-fidelity wireframes. Usability studies with them over zoom were sometimes a challenge but provided valuable feedback to ensure we were creating a user-centric product.
A fully responsive, user-centric Open banking console was created that allowed users to create fully customisable data, payment and donation journeys for their different business cases.
Participatory design was facilitated in parallel with creating this solution. It successfully involved the stakeholders, designers, researchers, and end-users in the design process to help ensure that the end product met the needs of its intended user base.
We continue to grow our client base and test frequently to ensure we are building a user-friendly product.
Below is an example of how industries such as credit and lending, insurance and comparison can gain valuable insight into their user's transactions by using our AIS data journeys.
These different journeys show how businesses and charities can use our PIS payment journeys to make payments or donations a far more efficient process.
