Case Study - Instant Banking
Self-activated account openings
UX Designer
I designed the CommBank App’s first native origination experience, enabling prospective customers to open an account and start transacting in minutes
Key outputs from me included designing a new form-field pattern and crafting UI copy for the experience
This form design later became the primary pattern for native form fields and data input across the CommBank App and I used the UI copy as the basis to develop a new conversational pattern for the content design style guide
Background & Context
The award-winning CommBank App allows millions of customers to access fast, secure banking on the go. Despite being one of the Bank’s key digital assets, and the number one banking app in the country for a successive years, limited work had been done to enhance its acquisition capabilities
A decision was made to focus the initial work on a relatively simple product, a transaction bank account
Seed funding & Initial Research
Although a business commitment was made to focus on developing how transaction accounts could be spotlighted on the mobile channel, this was only initially a small amount of seed funding intended to understand the space better - what a technical design might look like and what steps a customer might experience
While the solution design was being architected, I ran a customer-facing test to gauge appetite and gathered supporting secondary research insights
Green light for Delivery
The initiative’s primary priority was functional, its purpose to create a technical solution to enable prospective customer’s to self-service their origination journey to become a customer of the Bank. With this in mind, the user experience focused on how to best facilitate that from an execution point of view. Once funding was secured there was approx. 2 weeks before the formal start of the delivery
I used the short window to:
Interview and shadow branch staff during in-person account openings
Met with members of the Enterprise UX team to get an understanding of internal systems involved with ‘originating’ a new customer
Worked with the team’s Product Owner to understand the desktop customer funnel
Worked with a UX researcher to map out a testing plan, in particular recruitment of participants with no existing relationships with the Bank
Focusing on Form Design
& Problems with Usability
Basing designs off of existing forms within the App, successive rounds of usability revealed issues with completion on a small screen
Because of the personal information required from customers, traditional design patterns to overcome data entry challenges in mobile devices, such as date pickers and pre-defined selections, were of limited use
Solution
I designed a new form field pattern to capture data, which borrowed from the typeform, conversational style of web experiences with design iterations specifically focused on ease of data entry on a mobile screen:
Native keyboards, number pads and date pickers to minimise user error
Sequencing of keyboards & number pads to reduce cognitive load by limit switching between different input types
Floating text field label to retain context ‘Next’ on keyboard advances to next field with the keyboard already onscreen to facilitate quick entry
Subsequent usability tests showed a marked improvement in speed and accuracy
Results
This pattern of form design is now widely used across the CommBank app with all new projects leveraging the look, feel and technical components
Within 2 months of a public release, roughly 1000 new bank accounts were being opened through this experience per week