Bank of the West Account Details
Since the pandemic, fraud has been steadily on the rise and has significantly affected Bank of the West's customer service wait time and branch experience. Our team decided to revisit the account details page – the page where you access your account's balances and transactions – to provide more self-service opportunities for our customer base.
QUICK OVERVIEW
I led a cross-functional team to conceptualize a new account details experience end-to-end, resulting in better discoverability of fraud-related and record-related services. I also introduced process changes within our team to foster more collaboration between designers and other stakeholders.
View Statements - Discoverability
20% increase
Dispute Transaction - Discoverability
38% increase
The Challenge
Identify a design for the account details that provides a better self-service experience on key tasks specific to a checking account.
Since the pandemic, fraud has been steadily on the rise and has significantly affected Bank of the West's customer service wait time. When our branches can either be 1 mi or 180 mi from any customer, we wanted to address the problem by exploring self-service opportunities on Mobile.
Understanding User Concerns
In our JIRA tickets, our product managers typically give us a good understanding of business needs and constraints. This isn't as true for user needs. In response to this, I mobilized my team to dig through past research documents, and here is what we learned:
USE CASES / JOBS-TO-BE-DONE
When customers open the account details page, they look to do the following tasks below (in order of importance). This information was extrapolated from a set of interviews conducted in 2019 by our research team.
- View balances and transactions
- Money movement services (eg., transfers, deposits)
- Fraud-related and records-related services (eg., Statements)
DIRECT SUCCESS RATES (TREE TEST / DISCOVERABILITY TEST)
On November 2021, our research team ran a tree test with 100 people– prompting testers to find specific activities in a text-based menu. From that effort, we made a list of essential services that weren't discoverable 50% of the time (see below) and wanted to improve.
Aligning on the Problem with the Team
After collecting insights from research, I created how might we problem statements to clear with my team so that we're all on the same page.
How might we support our customer’s day-to-day needs (viewing their balance and recent transactions)
How might we improve the discoverability of account services like disputing transactions and viewing statements?
- How might we reduce fraud and reduce the number of calls in our support funnel?
General Process of What I Did
After conducting more generative research involving competitors, I planned my team's activities and my day-to-day through a project plan mimicking the flowchart above. I also coordinated working sessions 1x - 3x a week with my project partners and collaborated with the research team on research plans, interviewing, and synthesis for two studies.
Design Iterations
Final Design
Matching User Expectations and Jobs-to-be-done
While designing, I wanted to match the hierarchy of needs and expectations that our users have when entering this page. One technical limitation we faced – Account Services was placed on top of Recent Transactions, despite transactions being the more important priority. Due to database limitations, we had to output the whole transaction list instead of shortening it to three lines (see ideal transaction list) with a further expandable view.
EVALUATING JOBS-TO-BE-DONE
To determine if we're meeting our customer's day-to-day needs, we had our customers create their version of Account Details using broken-down components of my design. They created a similar hierarchy to what we designed, apart from transactions being below fraud-related and record-related services.
- View balances
- View transactions
- Money movement services (eg., transfers, deposits)
- Fraud-related (eg., card lock) and record-related services (eg., statements)
Addressing Discoverability
I created this design to make top-of-mind services for checking accounts more discoverable. Using analytics and insights from moderated interviews, we ended up with the following mix of services. Transfers and deposits at the top card and important fraud-related services in another component. Clicking into the '...' opens up an activity sheet with tabs. The items in this menu were grouped according to content type and how often they were used by our customers.
EVALUATING DISCOVERABILITY
To evaluate if we're effectively solving for discoverability, we ran another tree test using the same methodology our November tree test used.
View Statements
44% → 65%
Dispute Transaction
20% → 58%
