Barclays

Key projects

Defining the future vision for Barclays Business customers. Reviewing current performance and customer behaviours, to create a bespoke banking experience.

Analysing existing taxonomy and defining new structure for secured business banking navigation, across all banking channels. Auditing and reviewing discoverability challenges and performance of the existing navigation across all of secure online banking.

UX Design • UI Design • Research • Prototyping • User Testing

Future vision

Redefine the Barclays Business banking experience, to create a bespoke one stop place for business customers to manage more than just their banking.

Discovery

The project began with a 3 week discovery phase looking at developing a deep understanding of the design challenge and core customer needs. Identify early opportunities to improve the customer experience. Understand key projects that are underway that impact on the homepage. Understand the current structure of the OLB (Online Banking) and BMB (Business Mobile Banking) homepage

Customer profiles and context

The outcome gave us a clear understanding of the customer context. From this it was possible to make a synthesis of the different customer's profiles. Highlighting the elements of the mindset of the business, its complexity, the ownership and the banking experience that contribute to the customer profile.

Then identifying how the customers conduct their banking activities, summarising what they do in which context and when. The synthesis of this part of the research was a clear definition of different operation modes and gave us the necessary information to move onto the ideation phase

Designing an experience that works

Starting with a low fidelity test approach with a few cycles of design iterations. Allowed a simple focus on the main customer interactions and experiences to ensure that the needs of the business customer were met and the optimal experience was achieved.

These testing session enabled customers to be observed in real time identifying the tools customer they actually require and in the appropriate context to when and how often they use them.

Refining the experience

Once requirements were defined, it was possible to refine the design and start to build out the digital experience.

With a mobile first approach for a simple mandate business banking structure, creating a seamless experience that would allow the user to navigate across a few accounts and manage their business from within one app.

The further developing this to look into more complex customers with multiple businesses in order to validate the designs.

Validation

Using a prototyping software to build and deliver the final vision to showcase all the features that had been previously tested allowing validation of the hypothesis with customers.

Taxonomy

Auditing existing discoverability challenges and performance of the existing navigation across all of secure online banking. To then map out and reprioritising the taxonomy.

Producing content surveys to send to customers to gain understanding on suitable terminology. Carrying out user validation of existing and new navigation structures using Treejack testing methods

Discovery

When analysing the existing navigation we found an unbalanced focus towards selling. With the primary objective for online/mobile banking customer to be able to self-serve their banking needs the navigation didn’t support this.

There were so many inconsistencies; from labels, internal jargon, hiding important features under titles which made little or no sense. All making the navigation really difficult to use. Also there was a huge difference between mobile and desktop navigations, with few alignments across the two, making it even harder for customers to successfully navigate across different devices.

There was little attention to ensure that the navigation elements were fit for purpose and in an order of importance for the user. Causing links to appear in the wrong experiences for the wrong product.

Ideation and testing

Carrying out 2 minute rounds of individual card sorting reviews, to test and validate structures, labels and positioning of items in the navigation. Alongside reviewing current performance, this gave a good understanding of how to condense and communicating the products and services offered to customers.

This restructuring allowed for alignment across online banking, so customers with multiple account types would have a consistent approach when it came to navigating through banking.

Remote tree jack testing help to further validate and refine the proposed structures, for both business and personal banking, across desktop and mobile environments.