Building Financial Service App from scratch.
Overview
We learned from research that in addition to creating an online presence, finance is one of the biggest pain points for self-employed. So Jimdo decided to invest in the idea of integrating a business bank account to the product portfolio.
The Goal of this project was to get an MVP product to the market in less than a year.
The Process
We formed a new team for this project and defined a lean UX process based on the Double Diamond Theory.
My Role
Product designer
Wireframing, Interaction design, User Research, UI design
Creating wireframes and click dummies
Creating wireframes and click dummies was incredible helpful to get user feedback early and learn how users interact in a sensible surrounding like a banking app.
The click dummies also helped a lot in communication and alignment with the 3rd party banking provider we worked with.
In this project I created the wireframes directly in Figma. That makes it easy to transform them to clickable & testable prototypes.
Creating the designs
I created the high fidelity mockups in Figma. That allows our developers to inspect the designs and export CSS and html if necessary.
To make sure to figure out missing interactions or states I conducted a handover UX review for every frontend ticket with the responsible developer.
Learnings & Takeaways
Working closely with external partners like in this case a banking service provider in an extremely regulated market like the finance sector was new for us as the team and also for the company. This comes with a lot of dependencies which makes the planning especially in development difficult. Despite this we managed to ship an MVP to our customers after a little more than 1 year.
Some key learnings:
- Be pragmatic. The Finance sector is highly regulated. That means that a lot of content has to be integrated which on a first view stands in the way of a good user experience. You can not find a creative solution for all of this issues.
- Test early. As the financial sector was new territory for us it was crucial to get user feedback as early as possible. Always find ways to collect feedback from users also in early stages of the product development.
- Involve engineering upfront. You are not 100% free to design the user interaction if you work with an external banking provider. For understanding the technical boundaries it is essential to involve engineering upfront. That helps to prevent adjustment cycles in the development phase.