Background & Problem

Swedbank Baltics has 1.2 million unique users monthly in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (~6 million population total). The old (hybrid) app was built with little UX research involved and struggled to scale alongside the ambitions to bring the best experience to mobile.

Solution

The goal was to build a native (iOS and Android) product, keeping core functions and features of the old app. We also “tunneled” user experience, so users could focus on a single manageable step at a time.

MVP app - Design Process

The team had followed an iterative design process from the outset of the project. By the time I joined, the MVP part of the project had already gone through the following stages:

Wireframes and QOC analysis

We had a brainstorming session inside the team to generate as many layout ideas as possible. As a result, we had over 30 rough sketches after an hour session, which we grouped into 3 layout types (cell, list, and cards) and generalized ideas with the majority of votes into 8 main concepts.

Have “Why” behind every desision

After a brainstorming session, we tried to decide which concept to choose and ended up building QOC tree graph to make all options & reasoning more illustrative. We also conducted a quick Guerrilla testing on paper prototypes to double check if our decisions coincide with users perception.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

When first prototypes were done, we focused on testing of an MVP app to incorporate user feedbacks early. We tested and refined design iteratively. The changes that came after the first rounds of iteration were mainly not in the app structure but in details.

Design changes for better

Banking app is information dense even at an MVP stage. When new features are added, it would get only worse. So we created a stronger visual hierarchy between headers and subheaders, main and secondary text to help users orient in the layout.

We made it through:

Summary view

During a dogfooding stage we got feedbacks that users were not happy with an account balance popping up on the screen with a large font size right after log in. They felt like it could potentially infringe on their privacy.

So we created a summary screen (which was in a pipeline, but not a part of MVP) and also reduced font size on a detailed screen.cy.

Visual Design System

The end result was a component library so that designers had reusable building blocks and developers could easily get characteristics of all elements.

I was solely responsible for creating a mobile design system.

Takeaways