Deliverables
User Interviews User Testing Experience design UI Design Interaction Design Prototyping
Project Team
Jake White, Account Manager - Squiz Sonia Pitton, Project Manager - Squiz Donna Moore, Digital Team - Santander Adam Towell, Digital Team - Santander
Overview
The Brief
As a part of their Funneback Search retainer package, I worked with Santander incrementally in analysing search performance, using data to inform potential innovation.
Within a recent squad catchup, I presented Santander with search data informed by their Funnelback dashboard (which I'm unable to include here) that showcased the increased use of pagination, drop-off, and contact page referral midway through a search.
The data in hand was a clear indicator of a pain point, and one that the digital transformation team received a very quick green light to work with Squiz in actioning at pace.
The Problem
Working with a globally recognised organisation of course brings very strict rules as you would expect. Upon meeting with Santander's digital team in a kick-off meeting, we collaborated to lay out clear project expectations, to discuss what success would look like, and to obtain key content and access to asset banks.
Santander delivered key design boundaries that were as followed:
Squiz must use and adhere to the Santander Group design system (delivered as an invision link).
Whilst they recognised flaws in areas of the UI kit, the request was to use current design patterns unless a particular component doesn't exist in their design system. This is to maintain a lean build time and remove the need for walls of sign off on adding new patterns to their repository.
Provide multi-orientation, multi-viewport considerations.
Create a clickable prototype for moderated testing purposes.
Ensure designs are delivered within a handover environment for technical analysis.
Research Synthesis
I facilitated a workshop with the Santander digital team to dissect the data we have from a backlog of feedback forms (fed into a google spreadsheet to populate a product performance dashboard).
To highlight key research findings across all user types and aid in our decision-making, we utilised empathy mapping. This helped us make inferences about our users based on their behaviour, prioritise where our focus laid, and determine what the most important takeaways were.
Our top takeaways were:
Users searching for banking information often lost interest and resorted to contacting
Santander via telephone, where they'd wait in a telephone queue for a decent chunk of time.
Users felt the search engine results page was ineffective and dated.
Users would often venture no further than the 2nd tier of pagination before dropping out.
Business account users would rely on site search more than any other user type.
Our core users were:
Personal account holders
Select account holders
Business account holders
Wireframes
To articulate our suggestions, I created multiple wireframes (low to mid fidelity) to amplify our solutions. This process enabled me to absorb and action requests made by the project team at pace.
Final Design
After receiving executive sign off on the added functionality, I created high-fidelity mockups to articulate how the new modules would sit within the existing framework.
We carefully analysed the relationship between the newer modules within the existing framework, and how cohesively they adapt. Amidst the creation of work, it was raised that a lot of the existing UI kit required a makeover from both a visual and a UX perspective.
The necessity to enhance the UI kit and design patterns brought Santander to a place where they would need to stage the application of the works in correlation with a design system makeover. In keeping with this, we prioritised the application of the filter module and left the rest of the innovation work with Santander to launch strategically in accordance with their roadmap.
Reflection
We quickly found technical solutions to fix a laboured user experience through understanding Santanders users and competitors at an early stage. We also met multiple points of reflection surrounding how users welcome current design patterns and the general aesthetic of the Santander website.
Squiz's relationship with Santander exists solely through search (the Squiz Funnelback product), but we were able to deliver evidence that other elements of the website that weren't in the scope of the project play a big role in how search is received. Using this information, Santanders digital transformation team carried takeaways that could inform the beginning of a wholesale design system update.
Using the Funnelback search analytics dashboard, Santander recorded dramatic improvements in how users discovered important information, and we continue to monitor the results to date.
