My role in a nutshell
Requirements gathering
UX/UI design and documentation
Alignment with stakeholders from Italy and Germany
Iterative qualitative and quantitative user research
Mentoring junior designers
Project scope
For this project, I was contracted by Mastercard as a Senior UX Designer to support their customer, Unicredit Bank Austria, with design consulting. The project started in September of 2022 and ended in January 2024.
Unicredit Bank Austria AG is an austrian bank that got acquired (along with other european banks) by Milan-based european banking group, Unicredit, in 2005. Because of this merging, there are still massive alignment efforts in all the processes and softwares used by the local banks, mainly between Italy, Austria and Germany, with the Milan-based Unicredit team holding the lead. I was the UX lead from the Austrian side (specifically placed in the Bank Austria Consumer Finance Department), but I also had the opportunity to contribute to the Account Opening team.
UX inbetween business objectives and legal requirements
The customer-facing flows of the Consumer Finance Dept. This was the most important document (set in Figma) for the whole department and there were loads of comments and requests for change every week, coming from the business, legal or third party providers.
From September 2022 until about April 2023, the whole Consumer Finance team was busy with “MVP1”, namely the minimum viable software on the public website that would allow new-to-bank customers to apply for private loans. I was responsible to align with the italian and the german team and setup the austrian flow for new-to-bank customers, taking into account necessary differentiations. Deviations from the italian flow were resource-heavy and thus, could occur for one (or more) of the following reasons: specific local legal requirements, legacy processes of Bank Austria that were difficult to change, differentiation in strategy between countries. As the legal requirements often needed a lot of clarification and there was a variety of opinions in the team on what is strategically important, the requirement gathering process took long time and was updated also during the development.
Along with setting up the MVP1 flow, I worked on the design testing (making sure production software is aligned with figma) and to coordinate the localisation in english and german together with developers, copywriters and experienced colleagues. Moreover, we discussed, defined and codified all errors for all countries in Figma, paying attention to the differentiations between countries.
Examples of error screens in case of non-eligibility of the customer.
Among the difficulties we faced, was that the developers’ team that resided in Italy, was split in different streams, each handling a different part of the software. Access to developers has been limited for budget reasons. Therefore, UX design, design testing and localisation requests had to be planned carefully and also, I had to be ready to compromise in favor of a better price-performance ratio.
In April 2023, we started discussions on the MVP2. This time we planned to add new functionality (such as refinancing of old loans) and the process on the app for all users with a Bank Austria account and additionally, we planned to update all the flows used by branch employees. The process in MVP1 has run partially in agile and partially in the Waterfall model. The first part of MVP2 was run in Waterfall, mainly because the requirements gathering required even more time and elaboration.
During this time, I was responsible for the setup and management of all flows - the preapproved loan flow (PALO), the New-To-Bank customer flow, the existing customers’ flow and the respective flows for the branch employees. This meant managing the influx of change requests from all different stakeholders, proposing design solutions and onboarding a new employee on her UX/UI tasks.
Benchmarking & User Research
Our user testing plan.
The process of applying for a private loan through a mobile app includes a lot of steps, complex concepts and terminology and conditions written in small font and in a legal jargon. Thus, during the phase of requirements gathering in MVP1, we needed to test the process with real users to actually understand what would be their hurdles during the process. For this reason, we planned qualitative interviews that we assigned to an external agency and quantitative user testing that we run with the Useberry platform.
Our results focused on insights from the heatmaps (where do users click, if they need information that we are not providing, if they perceive on UI elements wrong); on insights on terminology (on which terms we need to add explanations); on the assistance needs (what form of assistance, if any), inclination to consider a loan and other first impressions. We found out that while users had an overall positive impression of the prototype, they found the process long and demanding, some terms were not understood (such as the expense categories and monthly income), the documents could not be well previewed on mobile and that upselling can trigger a negative reaction (mistrust). We also performed benchmarking, comparing the process with the respective processes from the biggest Unicredit competitors in Austria. All our conclusions from the quantitative, qualitative and benchmarking studies were distilled into design recommendations that were prioritised by the management and adopted to an extend in MVP2.
These were the final comments the participants provided after user testing. A lot of more specific questions were answered beforehand.