- Role: Senior UX designer
- Period: April 2015
Due to the limited budget on this project, I designed the approach like a sort of Hackaton. It made us and our client more agile at making decisions. And led us to unexpected success.
The French bank Caisse d'Epargne was a long lasting partner, when the IT department asked us to improve a data-visualisation platform. The tool helps bankers build contracts with business customers: if a shop wants a card system for payments, the bank offers a contract for this service that’s based on anticipated earnings. The platform monitors the shop activity and suggests a rate.
Starting with a day interviews and observation, we quickly found out that users could see the potential of the tool, but found it so hard to use it wasn’t worth the effort. Typically, this was some opportunistic techy project, but hardly anyone at the bank was using it.
We had just five weeks to develop a concept that would be implemented right away. We decided to work in a super iterative process in order to achieve a faster and bolder decision making process. Meeting the client every week would enable us keeping in close touch and share our thinking in a more dynamic way.
At the end of the first week, we presented a spectrum of ideas for the re-design, ranging from ‘safe’ to ‘very ambitious’. The most radical of these was moving it from a search-based ‘bottom up’ experience to a ‘top down’ dashboard approach. It required a complete restructuration of the tool, but even considering the limited time frame, the client team choose to follow us on this exciting approach.
Get back to your primary ambitions
A month after the delivery, as we met again the project manager, she reported us : “Advisors love it and use it so much that it brought our server down…forcing us to upgrade it! We had a standing ovation when we presented it at the end of the year success stories session.”
With this project, we turned a brief from “generic best practices and guidelines” to a complete re-design based on user research and adapting to a very specific context. For us it was a chance to claim that design is not generic, and to apply it throughout the approach we offered.
