Andrei BIlan

The banking experience

Turning a complex process into an easy and beautiful ride

Role

Involved in all aspects from web app and mobile to atm terminals, my goal was to design a modular system that would allow showing each user only the items available for him at a certain moment in time.

The idea was to make the banking experience simple, enjoyable and fun in order to increase the customers’ involvement, UI and UX wise.

My team and I created the key user personas – corporate, young and middle-aged – and actually talked to some of the existing and potential clients to better understand their needs and preferences. We found they liked nicely designed colored apps, but the key aspect was user-friendliness. And that they had trouble understanding the banking terminology, determining the extra charge of a transaction, or performing some specific tasks (such as split-paying a bill).

The most important KPI was the average amount of time spent to complete a transaction; so we started monitoring that. And the design challenge was integrating the overly complex menu and options.

In order to reach the objective, we made sure the user’s path to completing an action was clear enough: clearly labeled items, added easy-to-understand call-to-actions and plenty of tooltips, made the progress display visible, and skipped as many non-necessary steps as possible.

Another good idea was to animate the menu, while making sure the items stacked behind it were still visible – and it worked. And of course, ensuring the apps, features, and processes are coherent throughout the many devices a user might have.

For the atm terminal, we had special aspects to consider. The most important one was that we were dealing with a Turkish bank operating in Eastern Europe, so we made sure we display everything in the user’s native language, starting right from the greet.

Responsibilities 

The buying experience

How using prior learnings helped the new product gain traction

Role

I was responsible for the concept and design of the whole checkout process.
The entire buying process was cluttered and had a lot of options. Notifications, validations and hints proved to work.

Pre-check out tax and shipping estimates
Many e-commerce sites lose users at the cart page because they can’t preview their final charges before initiating checkout. In a recent study, 37% reported they abandon carts when this information is presented too late in the checkout process.

Encourage users to login in order to see personalized offers
Even though in general retail experiences, it’s recommended to give users the option to checkout as guest – for those who forget their password and don’t want to go through the password recovery process – in this particular case, the login was essential for showing personalized offers and discounts, tailored to the user’s profile.

Allow users to take photos of their credit cards to populate information or make sure the input fields are pre-filled with the non-necessary info, like commas, separators, and so on.

Responsibilities