Re-design & re-platform of onboarding journeys
In early 2019, I worked as a Lead Experience Designer in a ‘Savings’ squad at Nationwide Building Society alongside a Researcher, Business Analyst, UI Designer and Development team.
Like many large organisations, legacy technology was preventing Nationwide from effectively managing their online onboarding journeys. In addition, the existing journeys weren’t addressing customer needs and also needed to be updated in order to factor in new regulatory (KYC) requirements.
Whilst moving the onboarding journeys to a new cloud based solution, Nationwide sought to define and deliver an improved customer experience standard that would also inform Nationwide’s overall design system.
Our squad worked highly collaboratively and through the following key stages in order to reach our solution:
Discovery & definition
Gathering and aggregating requirements from multiple stakeholders
Market and competitor research to establish emerging trends and areas of opportunity
Capturing of key questions and assumptions
Exploratory user research
User testing of existing journeys
Develop & deliver
Ideation
Concept and prototype creation
User testing of proposed solutions
Design production
Defining atomic (design) components
Defining design patterns
Taxonomy and archiving of patterns and components in Abstract
Our Savings squad worked alongside the Current Accounts squad to deliver a new standard for Nationwide onboarding journeys. All key patterns and atomic components were stored in Abstract and made available to the next wave of product squads so that they could deliver their respective journeys quickly and consistently. Patterns were labelled agnostic of product and were focused on the user interaction thereby making the patterns scalable to any given context.
Nationwide could define the requirements for any new onboarding journey and use the new standards to release an MVP significantly faster, leaving more time and resources to focus on optimising the onboarding journeys through ongoing experimentation.
This was a large programme of work with many stakeholders and consequently many strategic objectives were highlighted as ‘being important.’ Part of my role during this project was to point to the most critical customer needs to address whilst continuing to deliver quickly and efficiently in order to move away from the legacy platform. A key part of being ‘efficient’, was to highlight the huge overlap between product squads by aggregating requirements. This enabled us to merge product squads and encourage re-use, thereby freeing up time and resources to look deeper into unique customer problems that might exist in specific customer/product scenarios.