Overview
This was a part of a Digital Transformation process and it was born from a Discovery and research process within the Bank. It was focused mainly on strategy definition. We work with several areas of the Bank and carried out several workshops and ideation processes.
After two weeks of workshops and analysis, several areas of work were defined and the team was divided between Service Design and User Experience. I was part of the User Experience team that designed all the portals.
Problem
Each of the bank's areas had its portal, its suppliers and its design. This hindered integration, data tracking and towards all less efficient processes. In addition to generating many usability problems and difficulty solving tasks. Among the many problems that we find, I highlight the following:
- The purpose of each portal by the business was not clear.
- Lack of consistency making it difficult for users to complete tasks.
- Various usability and accessibility problems.
- Lack of brand identity.
Process
We carry out user tests and interviewed stakeholders to define a User Experience Strategy, types of users, and journey maps. Overall, we proposed two types of navigation:
- A search engine such that allowed quick access to specific content.
- A traditional navigation with a menu. In the tests, 90% of the users used the search engine to find the contents.
I decided to make an heuristic analysis through all the Portals and a diagnosis of the information architecture, navigability and accessibility and then we set the main pain points to focus on:
- Inconsistenciy
- Lack of coherence
- Fragmented experience
- Non intuitive usability and lack of accessibility
Solution
Defining a search engine was one of the most interesting things about this process. On one side because we were going to be able to measure different types of behaviors and on the other side, we were going to obtain a lot of data. After some research, we defined users for all the portals and we found out a common thing was that Customer Service was answering on the phone questions that were answered on the portals but were hard to find.
When the users were just looking for information or not stressed because of a problem they preferred a chat over a phone conversation. That's why we decided to use a chatbot that was able to redirect the conversation to a live chat. We created a character and a personality for each portal. According to the type of user and objectives of the portal, each chatbot had a different avatar and voice.
Goals & how to measure success
As the process was not implemented, we defined that its success, for the first stage, was going to be measured through tests with users.
So, we defined a system to know if a test was successful or not and to be able to compare it over time and iterations of the process.
Highlights
- Always map the process. This was a very complex and long work and there are many files, highlights, and insights that I've lost after delivering the process. This was also the beginning of a much bigger process and we set the basis for all the development processes.
- Don't make users learn new things when they don't need to. All users (from user tests) preferred to use the search engine over the menu. None of them asked how to use it or even hesitated and everyone felt that the interaction was -natural-. In the same way that maintaining the layout and reusing components allowed users to move from one site to another without having to think or waste time decoding how to solve a basic task.