Revamping Retail Banking

Backbase | Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Goal

To redesign the retail banking app’s dashboard and information architecture, addressing usability pain points and aligning the experience with client and leadership goals for improved customer satisfaction.

My role

As the UX research lead and designer, I collaborated with designers, engineers, and product managers.

Impact

Successfully launched a redesigned retail app experience, earning positive client feedback for its clean and intuitive design. 76% of clients preferred the revamped retail banking experience over the previous version.

Before and after

Approach

We started by understanding user and client frustrations and expectations for retail mobile banking. Backbase provides solutions for over 150 global retail, business, and wealth banks, including NatWest, Raiffeisen, Standard Bank, and others. This project aimed to address key usability challenges, such as features being hidden behind a 'More' button, which led to client and user dissatisfaction.

We began by asking:

  • What do consumers expect to see when they first open the app?

  • How do users organize and prioritize their interactions with retail banking features?

Process

  • Research: Conducted an expert review and user interviews for baseline understanding. Pivoted to open and closed card sorts and tree tests to understand how users structured content, gathering both qualitative and quantitative insights. Conducted iterative user testing sessions to validate and refine the designs through concept testing. Received ongoing client feedback.

  • Design collaboration: Led competitive benchmarking analysis to identify industry best practices and user expectations. Helped create low-fidelity wireframes to establish information architecture and user flow foundations. Assisted the development of interactive prototypes for user testing and stakeholder validation. Contributed to strategic design decisions and ensuring alignment with research insights. Maintained ongoing productive conversations with engineering teams to ensure feasible implementation and technical feasibility.

  • Impactful implementation: Replicated this research process for the web experience and collaborated with the Senior UX Researcher and designers in Business to conduct similar tests and create designs, ensuring alignment between the Business and Retail products.

Findings to design: examples

Impact

  • Successfully launched a new Retail app experience, receiving positive client feedback for its clean, intuitive structure. 76% of Retail clients favored the revamped Retail app experience over the old one.

  • Fostered enhanced cross-functional collaboration between Retail and Business departments, leading to smoother development and faster decision-making.

  • Initiated a new research repository project to centralize and organize all gathered insights, driving continuous improvement and alignment across teams.

  • This project not only transformed the retail banking experience but also set new standards for cross-team collaboration and user-centered design at Backbase. Looking forward, I aim to continue leading projects that fuse creativity with insights to drive impactful user experiences.

This video highlights the app’s streamlined design, key user benefits, and positive client impact