We started the project by going on a fact-finding mission by asking customers about their pain points concerning the Internet Banking platform and payments process. The take-away was three-fold – customers needed more flexibility with regards to international payments in foreign currency, they needed a faster way of authorising individual and bulk payments, and they also needed to be able to safely authorise and manage their transactions anytime, anywhere at their convenience.

With these findings in hand, we returned to the office to affinity map the key research insights and start white boarding ideas on how to solve them. These I took into design, mocking up low-fidelity wireframes followed by high-fidelity design according to the design system guidelines and a mobile first approach. This was done in-hand with a competitive benchmark analysis and best practice research to understand what our competitors and industry leaders had implemented. Once the high-fidelity designs were critiqued and ready to go, we conducted usability tests with our customers, and asked them to complete System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaires. This feedback enabled us to edit and iterate on the design, improving the overall functionality before it went into development.

A key part of the process was that our customers were involved in every phase, from research to testing, they were even involved in deciding upon the name of the application – SmartApprove!