RaboDirect Mobile App Case study

My Role

I act as an UX designer in this project. I was responsible for leading not only the UX design work, but also communicating and collaborating between RaboDirect Design team and SST developer team and Product owner.

The challenge

Building an app is easy. 16 year-olds build million dollar apps in their garages every other day. But things get a little trickier when the app you are building is for a bank. Designing and coding and app with lots of cool new features is the easy part. Creating a whole new customer channel, that is efficient, effective and contextual, comes with a whole different set of challenges including:

Provide all the features that customer’s expect from internet banking and deliver those in a lean fashion, with a mobile first approach.

Balancing security and fraud constraints whilst still making the app easy to use for customers.

Create a mobile banking app that is self educating their user base.

The approach

Research

RaboDirect specialising in savings, it focus on different type of high interest saving accounts. Its strategy is not to compete with tear one banking but working as a specialist in savings. Since RaboDirect is different from traditional banking, we needed to understand RaboDirect’s own customers more.

We conducted a series of interviews. Including customer interview and call center staff interview. Findings after the research were insightful. It provided enough information for us to nail down personas for RaboDirect. As a banking vender, we are not only trying to solve the problems of customers, but also clients.

Features refine

We spent a great deal of time on make sense of our research findings, and existing RaboDirect internet banking. This involved a tonne of task analysis and card sorting work.

These results keep us focused for the rest of the development cycle, these are the problems we keep in mind constantly through the design phase.

RaboDirect customer's average age is between 40-59. This age group are more conservative about manage their bank accounts on mobile phone.

Care of interest rate of RaboDirect customer is relatively higher than others.

RaboDirect customers use physical hard token to authenticate all transactions on internet banking. But most customer we interviewed expressed some level of dislikeness of using a hard token.

The framework

Iteration of design

We had 4 rounds of iteration to design RaboDirect mobile app interface. During the design phase, we followed the scientific method, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing and modification of hypotheses.

Requirements gathering

RaboDirect specifically came with a few difficult design challenges:

Linked accounts

Term Deposits

Collaborative design workshop

Sketching interface

Prototyping

Usability testing

Visual design

How we solve the problems

Results

Since this project is not yet released to the market, I can’t really say it’s a successful project. But what I can tell you is just two month before production, we conducted the last round of usability testing, just to refine our self before it goes to live. The testing itself was very successful.