Credit Union Bill Pay
Product Innovation Design Leadership
Overview
A credit union’s bill payment platform was showing signs of age and losing its customer base. We were engaged to rapidly innovate. Could a re-envisioned bill pay service attract Gen Z and young millennials?
My Contribution
As design director, I strategized and staffed the project, guided design & research methods, and led innovation and scope prioritization workshops. I actively prototyped and tested concepts with the team, sharing out key insights.
Impact
After 10 weeks of rapid innovation, our clients could confidently take action on dozens of key insights across 5 high impact areas of the product experience. They justified funding, secured staffing, and accelerated launch.
“We have benefitted from the full spectrum of what this team offers - from strategy and ideation to prototyping and iterative design.
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“We would not have been able to do it without this team. I’m looking forward to an ongoing relationship. The people are amazing, and we want to continue to benefit from their skills!””
Research & Inform
We started the 10 weeks of innovation with an intensive deep dive into baseline materials, demos, user research, heuristics, and trends. With this in hand, we did a rough cut of priorities, and coordinated with clients to determine maximum value for 5 innovation loops.
Stakeholder & user research – We kept it human from the start by understanding the motivations and needs of stakeholders and users.
Product owner goals
Voice of the customer and call center pain points
Target personas and user journeys
Gen Z interviews and research
Heuristics & industry trends – We studied current patterns used on the client’s site and on other credit union, bank and finance sites.
Site audit to identify issues
Competitive and comparative trends
Brain fuel targeting users and scenarios
Prioritize test sets – We prioritized the high value / highest risk explorations with the greatest potential benefits.
Workshop: high risk / high value features
Strategize: technical capabilities
Cluster: groups of features into benefit areas
Vote: critical needs + future game changers
Innovation Workshops
The cornerstone of our project was the innovation workshop. Each of five innovation loops began with a custom tailored workshop in which key UX designers, researchers, and product owners could come together and get very clear on what we were exploring, begin our double diamond ideation, and select areas for prototype and testing.
Refine problem statements – We took a general problem area and made it very specific through workshop prep and activities.
Brain fuel review: competitive, trends, analysis
“Mad Libs” fill-in-the blank problem statement
Refined statement as a team
Ideate and sketch with the group – Design and product leads generated and refined ideas in what they eagerly anticipated as the highlight of every innovation cycle.
“How might we” ideation quickly generated ideas.
Each member then sketched 8 ideas in 8 minutes.
The highest potential sparks of ideas were spotted.
Each member sketched again for 45 minutes.
Key possibilities from all perspectives shaped the foundation of requirements to be tested.
Prioritize key ideas to test – We needed to choose wisely to spend our prototype and testing time on the right items.
“Fruit mapping” our favorite elements throughout ideation revealed high interest areas for exploration.
After weighing diverse perspectives of teammates, we had a large pool of candidates.
Sprints were sized to prototype key features within one week and test within a 60-minute user session.
Prototype & Test
We continued our exploration in each innovation loop with strategically targeted prototyping and user testing. We built rough wireframes to try out a number of options, then narrowed to the most promising, adding interactions so that our facilitated testing sessions might reveal strengths and weaknesses of each.
Explore, design & wireframe – Based on workshop inspiration, our team of designers iterated through numerous deeper explorations.
Daily design check-ins kept the team united.
Cloud based collaboration through Figma empowered design velocity.
Medium fidelity component libraries sped design.
Team internal critiques strengthened ideas.
Add interactions – The prototype screens and interactions were designed to support the user testing interview script.
User testing moments were storyboarded to unite both researchers and designers.
Interactions were strategized to provoke decisions and expose opinions, sentiment and issues.
Prototype interaction fidelity choices were made based on level of research questions being answered.
Test usability & sentiment – End users revealed sentiments and feature level strengths and weaknesses of the design ideas.
We recruited Gen Z, Millennial and older credit union members and non-members.
We facilitated remote 60-minute interviews and supplemented with unmoderated card sorting, IA tree testing, and surveys.
Insights & Vision
Each innovation loop concluded with strategic alignment around key insights from the explorations and user tests. Our team analyzed test results, surfaced and shared powerful insight reports, and worked with the technical and business teams to drive consensus and action.
Sense making activities – We developed a visual note taking method that easily exposes trends, ideas, and recommendations.
A note taking board was created to script and visualize each step in the interview.
For each feature, note takers recorded and categorized observations.
In a recap after each session, trends were diagrammed, and recommendations surfaced.
Additional sense making activities were performed around card sorting, surveys, and other methods.
Share key insights – A report of insights was created and shared with the client team after each innovation sprint.
The identified insights were compiled into a report where each feature’s key decisions were explored.
Pros, cons, and supporting quotes were identified for each option, and final recommendations were surfaced.
Prioritize & take action – The client teams aligned on a common vision with inputs from the innovation sprints.
Product owners, designers and development met to strategize each decision point.
This drove consensus building and forged a single vision forward.
Outcome & Impact
After 10 weeks of rapid innovation with my team, our clients could take confident action on dozens of key insights across 5 high impact areas of the product experience.
Key Insights
Gen Z and Millennials trust and value online payments at credit unions.
Their idea of payments extends beyond “bills” to friends, charities, loans and more.
They will use their credit union in partnership with multiple modern payment methods.
Innovation
Modern, simple, mobile UX attracted Gen Z without alienating existing older members.
New visualizations of financial trends and "moving money" dates were key to adoption.
Acceleration
Clear product vision led to confident final project funding and implementation.
Our prototypes and insights accelerated the final design, development, and launch.
From Innovation to Deployment
Design Innovation – Design innovation is a powerful strategic investment when seeking to rethink an existing product or create a new product. Four to five key areas of opportunity may be visualized, prototyped, and user tested in about 10 to 12 weeks. This provides final product insights at a proof concept level which provide direction throughout the rest of the launch process.
Plan & Prioritize – Story mapping and sprint planning are led at the beginning of the design / build process and updated after each design innovation sprint. Some light story mapping is advantageous even before innovation sprints begin, although final planning is more powerful and targeted after the innovation explorations are complete.
Design for Production – High-fidelity final designs are accelerated by innovation prototype insights. This track may begin execution even before the first innovation sprint concludes if there are low-risk experiences outside of the innovation explorations to begin with. Then, as each cycle of innovation recommendations concludes, additional design for production work can be added to the backlog.
Build & Deploy – Agile development teams will leverage the high-fidelity final designs for production and code, test, and deploy the improved experiences. We have found that these development and deployment exercises are more successful after the investment in up-front innovation, especially when cross functional teams are included in the innovation sprint evaluation and prioritization.
Copyright © Paul Townsend