Being a Digital bank means that everything you build has to have great User Experience!

RiverBank was not just one project, RiverBank was creating a Design culture in the span of several months. For a digital bank having a permanent design department is essential as the make or break factor lies with customer experience (CX). This means hiring the right people is even more important than ever. Amir to the rescue 💪. I was hired to not only pick up projects that needed UX and/or UI design right away, I was also hired at RiverBank to also setup the "UX/Design"-department and help hire a great designer for a permanent role (phasing out the need for freelancers and agencies).

Setting up things

First things first, I needed to set up a simple yet effective foundation. I wasn't there to drastically change everything, I was there to nudge RiverBank to the right direction, making sure that when I had to leave the organisation still understands what design means and how to make things for their users. Here are the main things i did to achieve a better Design Thinking mentality with the organisation...

Organisational process

The current state was that external parties and/or development department themselves would translate business's needs into solutions. Although smart to keep the lines and hierarchy as short as possible between business and development, not as convenient for the end-users experience.

As a result, development would do exactly what business (thought they) wanted, which in return made some of the outcomes too complex or too business oriented and not customer centric (UCD). This didn't always leave a positive User Experience.

This process was missing a filter-wall between those two worlds. A UX designer should gather the information from Business and simultously looking at the needs of users. Translating that through workshops, inteviews, discussion-groups and research into the right solution(s) that then in turn together with development will be cut into MVP's (Minimum Viable Products).

Design and Design System

A design system is of course more than just components and colors, but in the case of RiverBank this was the first steps I took, so that development wouldn't Stop while research and testing where conducted. In Figma i created the first components for development to work on.

Projects

Now that the process is aligned and there is a Design System (components) set up, working on projects should be better streamlined. One of the projects I worked on at RiverBank was the Real Estate project, where users can request a loan by going through a few simple steps in dashboard.

View on RiverBank website

Would you like to see more examples? Sure, let me know.