Project: Westpac Home Loan Product
Westpac is Australia’s first bank and oldest company. It provides a broad range of consumer, business and institutional banking and wealth management services through a portfolio of financial services brands and businesses.
During my time at Harness Projects, I had the opportunity to work with Westpac to design a home loan package selection wizard for next home buyers.
Role: User Experience Designer & Product Owner
Contribution: Responsible for discovery, ideation, user research, research synthesis, mapping customer journey, user experience & user interface design, user testing, iteration and presentation.
The Problem
Westpac has learnt that customers often transact with a bank for a singular purpose or benefit like a home loan. The same customers would shop around and go to a competing service provider for other services like a credit card and transaction account. Westpac would like to offer customers more services which lead to higher revenue and customer retention.
As Westpac strives to adapt and be flexible with customer needs, how might we implement a flexible banking product selection process that also meets it's objective of making it simpler for next home buyer who select packaged home loan to add and bundle any additional product with their home loan.
Discovery
Interviewed two stakeholders; Product manager and Product Owner from Westpac to understand the business problem and the project scope.
User Research
Interviewed 5 users to understand their needs, pain points and experience with home loan. From the interview, I created two unique personas that vary from their goal and experience with home loan.
Research Synthesis
Map out the user frustrations and themes from the user interviews using post-it notes on the Miro board. The how might we statement exercise is used to help decide possible solutions from the user pain point.
Ideation
I believe looking outside of the banking industry and co-designing with the user in the early stages are vital when building a unique product in the marketplace that meets both business and customer needs.
Sketches
These sketches are inspired by competitors and indirect competitors user experience and interaction design showcased above.
Prototyping (Low Fidelity)
User Testing
Then I set forth to conduct user interviews and usability testing to get user feedback during the early stages of development. Below are the customer journey and research findings based on the initial prototype that the customer used.
I have noted down both positive feedback and area of improvement received by user testing below.
Iteration
After conducting user testing, I learnt that some of my assumptions were wrong. I was glad to identify the problems early on and note down user feedback. From that, I was able to learn from it and make a better product on the next iteration.
Interactive Prototype (Figma)
What I Learnt
After creating my first low-fidelity prototype based on my assumptions and undertaking user testing for the first time, I soon discovered that they were wrong. I am glad to have changed and improved upon my design when I receive feedback during user testing. That led me to create an even better experience from the user insights collected.
I would have spent more time polishing the interaction design and appearance of the mobile application. But due to the time constraint on the project, I had to decide to put my finite resource on either user testing or interaction design. I have decided to spend little time on interaction design and appearance. So I can focus my time and resources on user testing.
