2012 Case study – ATM redesign

In 2012, Experientia and Bank X began to collaborate on a new ATM interface design. The project resulted in an ATM interface that drives service uptake and relieves pressure on local branches and staff.

The ATM is one of the main touchpoints for customer interactions (Avaya & BT, 2012). These days, it is used for much more than simple withdrawals – it’s a service portal where people can make deposits, subscribe to services, pay bills, top-up mobile phones and more. However, Italy has one of the lowest annual per capita uses of ATMs in Europe. In addition, the way people interact with ATMs in Italy has not significantly changed in many years. New services have been added to existing frameworks, but our research showed that many functions are so hidden that people are unaware of them. Bank X had observed that there was low uptake of many of their service offerings, and wanted to drive uptake through redesign. They approached Experientia as recognised and local experts in interaction design with previous experience in financial kiosk designs.

A new approach to design – Right from the proposal and planning stage, we discovered there was a mismatch between the client’s expectations and our approach. Bank X wanted to commission a new ATM design and seemed to expect a process where they told us their goals, and we produced graphics. However we felt that for the project to result in successful outcomes, research on people’s attitudes and beliefs about finance was crucial.

We took on the role of educators, engaging the department that had commissioned the project to explain how the best way to improve service uptake via ATMs was dependant on going beyond technical definitions of what was possible with ATM technologies. Despite our sharing of case studies and metrics from other projects, we found that the bank needed greater than usual reassurance and were not ready to jump blindly into ethnography. This was probably both the first compromise that we made in our relationship and the slow starting point for an integration of people’s perspectives into the company’s culture, where qualitative research meant conducting spot interviews, e-mail surveys and client stakeholder interviews and workshops.

Educating also occurred from a design perspective. For example, Bank X’s design guidelines had been devised when print communication was the dominant paradigm. These mandated certain fonts and company colors as main design features. However, our heuristic evaluation showed that many of these were ill-suited to screens, with research showing many people actually didn’t choose certain services because they faced difficulty with on-screen reading. Armed with visual examples from real Bank X ATMs, Experientia had to physically demonstrate the current guidelines’ low legibility and understandability, proposing alternative solutions that would work better on-screen than their paper standards. This visual demonstration of the improvements convinced those in charge of Bank X branding to depart from the print style guide. This was an important victory for the project, because it ensured that the final design could be optimised for screen communication, maintaining the highest standards of usability and accessibility (not to mention aesthetic appeal).

Managing challenge – We quickly learned the difficulty in gathering information in such a fragmented framework, and how important it is to ask seemingly obvious questions when working with such a large institution. In this sense, the bank was also educating us: several months into the project we were made aware of Bank X’s vendor contracts and complicated supplier networks which included differing resolution ATM screens as well as an established ATM device base by over three device manufacturers on over 12 different ATM models. This was a challenge to our typical iterative design, prototype and test method, and required a much more intensive testing phase.

Another challenge became balancing the bank’s desire to propose offers with the customer needs and behaviors that emerged during the research phase, ensuring that the final design did not compromise the user experience. Our research showed that many users found advertising disruptive to the ATM experience (which should be quick and highly goal-driven), but including advertising was a crucial objective for the bank. In this way we moved into moderating, as sales-department goals were juggled against the commissioning departments’ goals to arrive at a conclusion that could satisfy all parties. Acting as a departmental tightrope was something our consultancy had to adapt to, as was finding the right mix between upholding people’s desires and generating income for Bank X. The final ATM design conceives the ATM as a touchpoint for personalised advertising displays in an ad hoc space, utilizing CRM data for individualisation and trust-building.

Outcomes and impact – Besides the GUI (Graphic User Interface), we delivered a complex roadmap for implementations and improvements which were the subject of a “feasibility study” by the bank. This was followed by iterative stages of design, testing and redesign, with frequent recourse to the educator-moderator-partner roles described, to ensure that the client was on board with developments.

The new interface was implemented smoothly across Bank X’s main territory, on over 6000 ATMs, thanks to a large and comprehensive testing phase that ensured the design ran well on the various ATM models in use. Offering a full range of services, the ATM also boasts a number of innovative features: in addition to geo-localization, it personalizes certain options and content to the current user, partly based on CRM data, and partly learning from the user’s most frequent behaviors. There is a significant decrease in time to complete common tasks, highly improved navigation and information hierarchy, and full-touchscreen interaction.

The installation and operation had a less than 1% failure rate and all goals were achieved within the timeframes set (and sometimes even in advance). At a usability level, reactions during the first year of use (beta-testing to full roll-out in early 2014) have been extremely positive. Initial customer satisfaction was measured by questionnaires sent by the bank to its branches, showing high satisfaction level with withdrawal functions, findability of previously hidden services and task completion. The inclusive design has reinforced design solutions for diverse customers and we have found that people from all walks of life have used the interface with no learning time needed.

If we consider the design a success from the people-centered (and therefore also reputational) point of view, further commercial success now needs to be measured over time against the project KPIs, such as whether the ATM ultimately drives service uptake.

Relationship outcomes – In addition to the concrete outcome of a successful and well-designed ATM, this project established Experientia as a trusted collaborator for Bank X. It positioned us as a potential partner for future strategic innovation in the field of multi-channel banking. However, as illustrated in the PFM and Mobile TV case studies below, this did not mean our roles as educators and moderators were finished. Instead, we had unknowingly developed a framework for how to work with Bank X, which involved a continual engagement in these three roles, adapting them to each new project and department we worked with. In this way, we continued to develop UX capacity within Bank X, and to embed the UX perspective increasingly deeper in the company culture.

2013 Case study – PFM design

Throughout 2012 Bank X had conducted proprietary quantitative research that demonstrated an emerging need for a financial management platform. In the wake of the financial crisis, more than a third of bank customers worried about making ends meet and wanted more control over their spending, while more than 50% of people managed their finances with paper tools. A new service could increase existing customer satisfaction and potentially expand the bank’s current client base. The bank’s research also concretized the looming importance of Big Data, hinting at the possible benefits to be gained by shifting from a model where departments own data to aqueous sharing, breaking down internal information silos. The Personal Finance Management platform (PFM), as well as helping people execute more control over their finances, would also link Customer Relationship Management and other disparate departments, bringing the bank’s individual digital initiatives together into a comprehensive robust offering.

Unfortunately, one of the hardest truths for researchers and UX practitioners acting as suppliers to large institutions to swallow, is that the design (or even redesign) of a product or service can be faster than the redesign of an institution’s culture. Having worked extensively with sister-departments on the ATM, it would have been ideal to have discovered that the ATM team had exchanged processes and relevant business goals with other departments to create a more unified strategy; that the executives we had worked with in the past would have internally preached the value of a user-centric approach, and that ethnographic research would have been commissioned early enough to impact design and prototyping.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. By the time Experientia was brought on-board, the PFM business unit had already signed development contracts for the platform’s staggered roll-out, even possessing a fleshed-out prototype that included information architecture, graphic user interfaces and interactions. These had been designed as a response to statistics from banking employees and call-centers instead of according to a deep understanding of people’s behaviors, their mental models and their value drivers. It was a signal to us that although Bank X felt that there was relevance to a UX approach, they had not yet really understood how to integrate it into existing systems and processes, or its real value.

In addition to encountering a “finalised” visual solution, Experientia’s researchers and designers found a plethora of incoherent features and functionalities within the platform that responded to individual departmental needs, but that didn’t necessarily convey customer-facing value. For example, the Cross-Selling department aimed to create greater visibility around new banking products, which was interpreted as the need for advertisements within a financial management tool. This seems almost counter-intuitive from a user perspective. There was also already an implementation roadmap for the platform, in which feature and function implementation relied not on what would be more useful for people, but on the developer’s internal workflow management: if during one phase their whole staff were present, more features would be realized. If there were fewer staff members available, fewer features would be completed.

An iterative educational approach – Within these several challenges, the biggest was educating Bank X on what it really means to adopt a UX approach. From our previous experience with them, both parties knew that it was important to provide people with products and services that satisfied their needs and desires. However, what still wasn’t clear was that a UX approach didn’t mean having an agency create a design “to-order”, nor incorporating user-centered methodologies into the blank spaces nestled between internal business planning and strategic department milestones. Unfortunately, due to the length of time the project had been running, it was impossible to “start over” and so in our role of educator we led negotiative meetings where we explained what could still be done, why it was important, and how in future projects this awareness could lend a competitive edge.

In our experience, when presenting user-centered processes to financial institutions, UX practitioners can greatly benefit from “hard” numbers or quantifiable results, which are naturally more familiar to them. In this sense, the role of educator goes beyond lecturing, as practitioners have to be able to demonstrate the business benefits of planning projects from a UX perspective, instead of retrofitting it.

Therefore, one of our first steps of involvement was a business meeting in which various groups – not only the department managing this project – were invited to understand the difference between user experience research and market research. As a team, we could determine the benefits provided by different methodologies, and decide which ones would be particularly useful to their already-developed strategy with regards to milestones and set objectives. A second workshop goal was to create a rapport with bank executives, hoping that with time we could be more than UX preachers. From the ATM project we had learned that once executives meet the people in charge of executing the work, they are more likely to listen and be open to recommendations, as a handshake goes much farther than an email signature.

Balancing UX methodology with banking mindsets – Several methodological compromises were made in light of the process executed up to this point. The first was the size of the participant sample to interview: typically ethnographic inquiry is conducted on a small sample, but this strayed too far from the quantitative research approach most executives had followed their whole careers, and in this regard, Experientia’s approach contradicted their mental models! Banking executives felt they could create bigger impact company-wide and better substantiate any potential changes to the platform if they had a bigger sample in which at least some questions could be quantified.

The second was to approach information architecture from a “lean” perspective in order to gather quick results that could directly impact the design of the experience – with less focus on the design of the deliverables. As there was very little time to plan an in-depth card sorting exercise, researchers gathered information on the areas which seemed the most crucial to test. This mini card-sorting activity became a part of the formative evaluation across all research locations, providing quantifiable results that were still deeply rooted in a people-centered approach.

The third compromise came about when re-designing the implementation roadmap from a UX viewpoint. Experientia’s initial deliverables, including a behavioral model derived from the ethnographic interviews, and personas, served as powerful leverage tools to explain what the platform’s overarching structure needed to be, and provided guidance on short vs long term service implementations. However as Bank X needed to ensure that multiple other stakeholders within and outside of the bank were also aligned and supportive of UX, Experientia was asked to lead dialogue between two external agencies besides ours, across 2 countries, and loop in Bank X’s legal and regulatory departments (to review research protocols, scenarios and concepts) – all of which seemed to go beyond our normal consulting responsibilities. For Bank X though, delegating the management of communication to us seemed fitting, as we were the UX experts. Soon we found ourselves presenting interview artifacts (such as video footage) at inter-departmental meetings to explain people’s perspectives. Unknowingly we were growing in our partnership with the bank by acting as a moderating, constructive partner who must give and take to achieve success.

Experientia had assumed that because we had previously completed work for the same bank, successive projects would become easier. While this was true in some respects (e.g. ethnographic research was now more readily accepted as important) a crucial learning point for us was to realize that major organizations have as many departments as sand in the sea, and so the role of teaching the value of a user-centered perspective never ends. Through educating and moderating, our internal researchers and designers learned that a quantitative approach can add business value, and that applying business terminology to present insights or ethnographic praxis methodologies doesn’t necessarily mean that we are betraying our professions or backgrounds – but rather employing a different kind of empathy. Tangibly, Experientia was able to employ a leaner approach that resulted in the framework of a major European personal finance management platform, launched in Oct 2013. Since the first release of the service has been online, 27% of its users are repeat bank customers. This value is significantly increasing each month and is considered a strong validation and encouragement to now accomplish a more comprehensive design of the services. As a consequence, this has created more space for the bank’s continual application of a user-centric approach and more focus on people behaviors and usage models of the services.

2014 Case study – Mobile banking strategy

In the introduction, we mentioned that one of the other drivers for change right now in financial industries, as well as in people’s mental models and behaviors, is technological innovation. Multi-channel access is being increasingly demanded by tech-savvy consumers, who want to access banking services as seamlessly as they access other services via smartphones, internet, and other technologies. With sensors and wearable technology rather closer than the horizon, banks need to have a strategic long-term vision of how to integrate mobile technologies into banking ecosystems.

Thanks in part to internal dissemination of customer feedback and proprietary statistics regarding the success of the ATM redesign and the PFM implementation, other Bank X departments began showing interest in the UX approach to design services and experiences. Experientia’s persistent engagement efforts had effectively started to shift the bank’s internal strategic project planning dynamics, and unknowingly, also our role. In 2014, the directors of multiple departments (rather than individual departments) retained us to create new mobile business models based around people’s needs. While middle-managers were deeply influenced by the overarching walled-garden culture, characterized by limited interdepartmental co-working and sharing, departmental directors had accepted a UX approach and were looking to implement it from the top-down. Initial efforts to establish trust and prove that user-centered methodologies could complement and meet business objectives, and two years of working together, including the messy parts of collaboration, had set Bank X on a path to change. Slowly, the gears of the machine had begun taking on more of an internal educational and moderating role, creating a bigger need for a strategic partner. We were not only known, but our demonstrated ability to compromise showed that we acknowledged the limitations of an institution in flux. So finally, for this project, we were challenged to do what agencies were created to do: provide strategic consulting.

The value of an external, authoritative voice – The specific goals for this project were a direct response to new mobility and smartphone behaviors in Europe. Internal statistics showed that “nearly 50% of online consumers in Germany, Spain, the UK and USA have a smartphone” and that 50% out of the 2,000 people surveyed for the study “like mobile banking because they can check the account balance before making a purchase.” These statistics showed great potential and opportunities for innovation that the bank had not yet successfully tapped into. They had developed smartphone and tablet apps, and their proprietary research showed that these were being downloaded but were used only infrequently, if at all. These findings are corroborated by publicly released research divulging the pivotal reason for the project’s commissioning: “Consumers are enthusiastically adopting mobile banking solutions (24% have tried using a mobile banking application at least once) [but] persistency of usage is lower than some predicted.” Although increasing the adoption and usage of the bank’s existing offer was a primary goal, executives felt that a user-centered perspective was crucial to gain the reverberating effects they aimed for. From a business perspective, a user-centered mobile services project would gain more internal support if it clearly provided insight into how services would meet each departments’ business goals, such as reducing cash in circulation, a considerable expense within financial institutions. Therefore, gathering information about related in-progress projects and future business-objectives was fundamental to overcome departmental communication roadblocks, and leverage the agency’s voice as an external collaborator more effectively.

Experientia planned several stakeholder engagement workshops to be held in a neutral environment, outside of banking offices. These gave managers the opportunity to lower barriers through a careful balance of business and participatory design. Activities were designed with intermittent individual engagement, to put participants at ease and comfortably gather multiple goals, from research and development, innovation and technology, and core business teams. Based on our previous learnings, planning would encompass technical implementation and feasibility, simultaneously airing “obvious” details and any legal and regulatory issues that might arise.

Unsurprisingly, we discovered that some competitively advantageous mobile banking concepts were already in development and that several future concepts showed great service experience potential. Although this meant that within this project too there would be some retrofitting, it was mostly stepping on the bricks that had already begun to create a foundation — not trying to instill user value into an existing construction. In fact, some of these concepts were already so richly able to link multiple touchpoints, it was much easier to create a service framework around them, even if they revolved around a freemium model. The value of being an outside authoritative voice was that now, as we were seen as a more strategic, consulting partner, we could influence high level decision makers to think about sequences of implementation, not just having people pay for specific features.

Methodological workarounds can still lead to success – The final deliverables for the project were a UX Roadmap to guide technical implementation efforts, mobile service-system concepts and usage scenarios merging online and offline touchpoints. Although to deliver these, we had to step outside of the textbook description of a smooth UX design process. For example, with little-to-no budget for in-depth ethnographic inquiry we conducted guerrilla ethnography to help identify quick but still meaningful insights to feed the conceptual phase. In addition, researchers and designers selected innovative service apps for self-applied cognitive walkthroughs, with results from both activities leading to important insights about mobile finance management, mobile payments and how mobiles affect the in-branch banking experience. Despite the fact that this approach was greatly appreciated by the client as there is a high cost stigma related to UX research, and one reason why so many organizations turn to traditional market research when looking for people’s perspectives, critics may state that the compromises made and the lean approaches taken could be detrimental to user-centered processes or even to the field of ethnography. But without employing a certain level of flexibility and understanding, of viewing the client with the same attitudes as we do users, UX practitioners risk stagnation.

It’s important to realize that in many large enterprises, concepts/goals have to be set in place before the project definition in order to achieve internal consensus and, consequently, funding. To help large institutions move towards more user-centered processes, practitioners need to be willing to adapt the same quick-witted, limber thinking that happens on the field. Fieldwork, by definition is chaotic, but we adapt and think on our toes, modifying as we go along without losing sight of the objectives. Naturally, we are trained to apply a certain level of creativity to our processes, which makes applying that very same creativity to whole approaches, projects or clients within our reach. The application of creative problem-solving, which at the end is what agile/lean approaches are, will become a greater requirement moving forward if we commit ourselves to helping large organizations and legacy sectors such as education, healthcare or finance embrace evolution.