Foresight Design Sprint with a Bank – “Good Problem”

Recently, I pushed and convinced another client to go on a design foresight sprint with me. Let’s give them a dummy name: Fast Pay.

The reason why I took this route : Fast Pay was perplexed about what problem they were looking to solve and wanted everything inside their mobile app. This was a great challenge for me to have this sprint and help them establish foresight thinking.

Preparation

A week before, I insisted them to clear their team’s schedule: CEO, Head of Engineering, Product Manager, Bank Expert and Product Manager. I also briefed them about the agenda for the sprint and what is expected from them along with the outcome.

Gathered 6 drawing books, bold markers, post it notes, colors tabs and a white board for the days ahead.

Sprint Day

What is the foresight challenge?

As a sprint master, I took the stage and began discussing what their main challenge was. They insisted on building a mobile app to help customers of bank continue their journey with delight after they have visited the bank for the first time. Something they thought is vacant from industry and need of a user in upcoming years. Although I wrote this challenge on white board, I knew they were thinking from a solution’s view rather than a problem’s standpoint.

What’s User Persona?

We discussed multiple personas and drafted their profiles. However, we decided that we have two kind of people to cater: People who have just started their career and mid- career individuals.

What might fail us to achieve this challenge?

This was followed by asking each participant to think one year ahead of time and share reasons that might fail us. And we were able to list down 7-9 points. This got the team really running.

Draw the user journey.

I drew the user journey by putting different kinds of customers on left and their journey for interacting with the bank. I asked executives and product manager about improving this journey. And I rectified four times.

How Might We

Along the way, every participant had post it notes which were titled “How Might We” and they wrote short points or minutes from each discussion that we were having. The reason for this was to paraphrase each point into a question. So there was one note about “How migh we..help users with budgeting” etc.

Where To Focus

 I placed all HMW notes on each part of the user journey that was still on the white board. Each post it note was staggered and placed appropriately. Now, it was time for the executive (decider) to decide which part of the journey to focus on.

At first, they let me add a new step to the journey and discussed about focusing on it. Then after lightening talks, it was decided to help users with budgeting which is a step right after customer makes a payment.

Change of Challenge

The challenge was replaced with this new focus and the right problem was selected. How can we help customer budget better after they have done a transaction. This was a “good problem” to solve and robust insight that could help Pay Bank sustain,

Lightening Demos

We took a short break and I prepared everyone about what to expect in this. They researched across different industries about how people from diet, sports, money and health industry budget these aspects. Each individual was allowed to show a picture or just write a note. This was placed on white board under different category such as shopping, utilities etc.

Voting

Every individual was handed over colored markers and were requested to paste on their favorite solutions. As you can see some solutions won hands down.

Sketching

It was time to use those 6 drawing books. Each participant in a solo position drew rough plain sketches and they were shown to entire team and discussed. This helped all individuals to think on divergent lines.

Prototype

Keeping user personas in mind, I had to pick a solution that would be familiar, secure and native to both personas because they were entirely different. Moreover, I began with rough sketches, content hierarchy, brand guidelines, mood storyboard and started drawing on XD.

High Fidelity Prototype: https://www.behance.net/gallery/52698689/Strategic-Design-Thinking-Bank-UX-Design-Sprint

Test.

We invited 3 users. Although, you should always bring along 5 users. Due to limitation of sources, we set up KPIs of usability, accessibility and sympathy. We presented them with an Adobe XD link which they could open on their phone just like a real app.

Iteration

Most of the results were positive except few and we are back to sketching to discuss these inputs and ready to send to production and development.