During the redesign of the Business Banking app for City National Bank, we realized that meeting our 5-month deadline would be impossible unless we enhanced our process. Ideally, we would have liked to dedicate more time to such a significant project, but the expiration of our vendor contract required us to rebuild completely in-house.
DESIGN TEAM
Lead UX Designer (myself)
Senior UX Designer
Senior UI Designer
Copywriter
MY ROLE
Team Management
Design and Strategy
Design QA
Stakeholder Engagement
PROJECT
9 Features
5 Month Timeline
An Evolving Design Process
Using a Discovery, Ideation, and Review process we planned to deliver 9 features over 10 sprints. After we completed a feature we held syncs to improve our process for the next one. We identified 5 notable ways to improve operations, design activities, and stakeholder engagement.
Discovery
Feature Demo
We held meetings with Subject Matter Experts so they could walk us through each feature. As a team, we asked questions to help guide our design plan.
Design Audit
Our UX designer conducted Heuristic Evaluations for our team. We utilized Figjam to gather and compile everyone's feedback to pinpoint usability problems.
Challenge: Subject Matter Experts were not readily available due to their busy schedules.
Solution: Tracking story points helped us stay flexible and work ahead on other features if demos couldn’t be scheduled.
Challenge: Heuristic evaluations were time consuming and the same issues were being identified by several team members.
Solution: 2 designers were enough to effectively perform the analysis. It can also be done asynchronously on a shared document.
Ideation
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Our UX Designer identified the use cases and the essential screens for each user flow create low-fidelity wireframes. After I reviewed and approved the designs, it was handed over to our UI Designer.
Hi-Fi Wireframes
The Roxbury Design System was applied in order to maintain consistency and alignment with WCAG standards.
Content
Working with the UI Designer, our UX copywriter revised the copy to fit the tone of the new Copy Guidelines created by the copywriting team.
Challenge: Team members would finish their task without notifying others which resulted in delays.
Solution: We used a combination of direct messages, Figma notes, and pings for live updates. We added morning check-ins in addition to standups to align the team.
Challenge: Designs fell behind schedule due to the complexity of the feature.
Solution: Working sessions were scheduled to provide design support when necessary. We also upskilled our UX Copywriter to make direct updates in Figma without the help of a designer.
Review
Share Out
We faced challenges in getting design approval with our stakeholders who expressed concern that changes to the original app might confuse users. Additionally, the engineering manager was concerned about overloading developers.
Reiteration
Designs were updated based on feedback from share outs and pushed back on items that would affect usability. Once a feature was delivered we held retros to discuss how our process could be improved.
Challenge: There was some difficulty getting design approvals from our business stakeholders.
Solution: We improved our stakeholder presentations by adding video prototypes, identifying parity with approved designs, and supported decisions with design references.
Challenge: The engineering team felt that there were too many design changes that would put them behind schedule.
Solution: Design changes were grouped into ‘must haves’ that affected major usability concerns and ‘nice to haves’ to be added after the first launch.
Delivered On Time!
With time to spare, we completed all 9 features.
Dashboard
Consistent header patterns throughout the app.
Components changed to the new design system.
The colors changed to align with WCAG.
Link copy changed to actionable language.
Bill Pay
Filter improved for power users.
Changed the dropdown menu to tabs.
CTAs anchored for easy thumb access.
Created a template for the ‘receipt’ screens.
Headers changed to be more descriptive.
Quick Transfer
Created new layout templates.
Changed wayfinding to a hub and spoke pattern.
Updated components to the new design system.
Copy changed to the new content design system.
Wrap Up
Our committed team, although small in number, managed to finish ahead of schedule. I was blown away by the professionalism and talent of every member and their ability to step up when needed.
The design process established a standard for how our teams gather requirements, allocate design tasks, and interact with stakeholders.
Big Wins:
240 Story points completed
9 Features delivered
1 Complete app redesign