Chase Bank has always put their users at the center of all their decisions. My task was to push the innovation further for what a traditional bank could provide their users to enhance their financial circumstances.
Jul - Aug 2021 (80 hrs)
UX Research, UX Design, Visual Design, Usability Testing
Figma, Notion, Procreate, Whimsical, Zoom
If you didn’t study finance in college, optimizing your personal financial health may not be your strong suit. But staying on top of your finances is essential to lead a comfortable, stress-free life.
Chase Bank has always put their customers at the center of all of their decisions. Making a real difference, doing what’s right, defining new paths, and creating the future has always been a part of their culture.
With this in mind, Chase will always be looking for ways to assist their customers financial health by providing innovative tools to help them manage their money more efficiently.
Now where do we begin?
Competitive research of other mobile banks and how they compare to Chase Bank. Strengths, weaknesses, areas of opportunity.
Market research to understand the industry as a whole better. Looking into where the industry is headed, trends, or potential features.
Locate motivations for users when it comes to their online banking experience. Gaining insight into users daily goals, pains, or needs.
Personal Money Management (Budgeting). Providing users a way to keep track of their spending to improve their financial health.
Instant Chase to Chase Transfers. Cut out the third parties, by granting Chase users the ability to transfer to one another.
Saving for Financial Goals (Vaults). Setting aside funds for a rainy day, a trip you’ve been yearning to go on, or larger financial milestones.
I was able to create a user persona based off my user research and data. Jonathan represents an amalgamation of key points from my users goals/needs and pain points.
In efforts to ensure a human-centered mindset, answering these six areas will help understand the broader influencers in Jonathan's life.
By comparing the business, user, technical, and common goals I was able to analyze where they may not align with the user goals and how we can align them with business goals.
By creating point of view statements for Jonathan, I’m able to think of how we might be able to assist him and some solutions that could come from these questions.
While auditing Chase Mobile, I decided on the best ways to add the additional feature, but not impose on the existing information architecture too much. Thankfully Chase Mobile’s set-up is pretty intuitive, allowing the additional feature to coexist gracefully.
To gain insight into the basic flow users will need, I created the main task and differentiated the key screens needed to create the ideal path for users.
But since users will likely take several routes to complete the main task, user flows illustrate each possible route.
FRUSTRATION
A few different issues came with the initial overview in My Financial Health. Users loved seeing their total balance, but wondered why their credit card balance wasn’t visible as well. Participants also had difficulty understanding what their income and expenses would be. And finally, they loved seeing a chart of all their financials, but thought it’d could be represented in a better way.
Solution
First addition was to add the credit card balance into the top navigation and take out the budget overview as it was redundant to the rest of the page. The second revision combined the “income/expenses” and “overview” into an “Available Balance”. Available Balance, otherwise known as Cash Flow, is a better all-encompassing view of your Financial Health. I created an information card to give a quick breakdown and access to additional guidance if needed.
FRUSTRATION
When reviewing the individual categories within My Financial Health, participants loved the breakdown of all the categories up front, but wanted even more of a visual overview of each category. During the testing of creating a new “Goal”, most of the participants selected “Edit” instead of using the Autosave Overview or the plus sign. There was also inconsistency with the sub-header “totals” in the top right.
Solution
I elaborated on each category to bring even more visual representation of the overviews. These graphs indicated the totals for the category, percentage used, and estimated completion date. The top right sub-header totals were updated to reflect the current months totals to match the “available balance” totals. The plus sign and edit buttons were taken out and replaced with “Create New Goal”, “Add New Budget”, and “Add Loan” to clearly represent the intention of the button. While “Edit” could provide different functionality (like quick remove), the additional functions didn’t make sense for this view.
FRUSTRATION
Most participants didn’t notice they were going into a more specific category when navigating from the My Financial Health to the Autosave or Budget Overview since the top navigation looked so similar.
Solution
In efforts to keep consistency and to avoid confusion, I revamped the category overviews to match the My Financial Health categories. I reorganized some of the commands so they would make more sense in their respective overview.
Based off the usability testing, the My Financial Health additional feature for Chase Mobile is heading in the right direction. Most all participants agreed they would use this feature if implemented with some mentioning they would even migrate their primary bank to Chase. It was interesting to work within a preexisting UI Kit, learn how an established company works in their design system, and create my own concept using the guidelines already provided.
Through analyzing the design opportunities of the usability testing I would like to elaborate even more on the different graph views for each category or different smaller functions within the overview page.
This was an important step in my design journey and there were two key highlights:
As this was my first time working within a preexisting design system, it was an opportunity for me to spend more time in the ideate phase without having to worry about conceptualizing a new UI kit. It also taught me I can’t always freely design something how I want, there may be protocol on how ideas are presented.
I came across a lot of road blocks when it came to the technicality of certain concepts. Mostly when it came to the specific financials and how each category could be represented correctly. I’m always trying to be mindful of if a concept can logistically work.
Conveying strong concepts to my user so I wouldn’t need to explain my thought process was very apparent throughout this entire project. Not everyone is on the same financial knowledge level, so I was doing my best to guide the user in my design without it feeling overbearing.
