NatWest / RBS
Human-Centred Design and UX at NatWest / RBS
Background
With 19 million customers worldwide, adding, changing or removing features within the various NatWest/RBS touchpoints had to be done with deep consideration for user needs, balanced against the needs of the business.
Product squads would always include a core group consisting of SMEs and product managers, supported by designers and researchers to ensure proposals were value driven, user-focussed and evidence based.
This page is a collection of artefacts describing the process and outputs of work that myself and the team developed for innovation squads and the mobile platform teams.
Collaboration and co-design
NatWest is a deeply collaborative environment, where squads work with business stakeholders, SMEs and customers to first gather research insights, and then bring those insights to life conceptually whilst working to understand the value of an idea or initiative.
The process we developed allowed different product and innovation squads throughout the company to bring emerging initiatives to a forum roughly similar to the classic product triad where teams would determine if a particular initiative should move into production, or if further research and design was required to fully understand if there was value in doing so.
Once an idea had made it through this process, researchers and designers would embed themselves within existing business teams, or help spin up ‘hot teams’ alongside developers to work on initiatives through to delivery.
Prioritisation and triage process
Initiatives and opportunities were continually assessed and agreed upon by the product triad, consisting of a PO, a designer and researcher pair, and a lead developer.
Our team developed a prioritisation and triaging process for research and design initiatives that allowed us to evaluate the impact of UX from a business perspective and collaborate objectively with our peers, on the basis of evidence we continually gathered from our customers.
Wireframing and prototyping
Concepts were always developed into mid/high fidelity wireframes and prototypes in order to test their utility with users.
Even with mature and accessible design systems in place, it was necessary to vary the level of fidelity we worked at depending on the immediate context.
Often I would develop first iterations of prototypes as a collaborative exercise with stakeholders, and maintain a low level of detail, by working on a whiteboard with a pen, allowed us to focus on user journeys and information architecture, and not get distracted with finer aesthetic details or give the impression that something conceptual was actually ready for production.
Working across touchpoints
In all instances, we had to consider the parity of features between different touchpoints, for example mobile features included far greater levels of interaction than desktop, and both were more feature rich than location based touchpoints which were largely content based with very basic transactional features.
Feature spotlight - Always On
Always On is a family of products available to RBS and NatWest customers primarily via the bank’s mobile app, with some products available via online banking or in-person in branches.
I worked with the Always On product team to determine how we could (and if we should) provide a credit score feature for customers, and what would be useful to customers if we did.
The project, which had been planned as a 6 month programme of work, was accelerated from initial briefing and conception into delivery, in 7 weeks.
Discovery workshops
To kick off, the team spent an initial 2 weeks absorbing and understanding existing research findings and data through a combination of desk research, analysis and workshops.
Further team and stakeholder workshops focussed on visualisation, concept creation, mapping and blueprinting user and service journeys, developing key use cases.
Concept development
With a mature design system already in place, we were able to rapidly develop and iterate on the concepts that surfaced in our workshops in high-fidelity.
Providing users with a simple view of their score, their credit history and how they compared to the national average turned out to be the most basic aspects. Providing advice via AI helpers was another basic need. Fundamentally, users wanted more education around credit scores, more transparency around how that score was given, and practical actions they could take to improve it.
Usability testing
We had a process of habitual testing in place, which involved running moderated usability testing sessions every two weeks with customers and stakeholders. The final stage of every initiative involved rounds of concept testing, usability testing and semi-structured interviews to determine the suitability of concepts for further development.