Banking Mobile App
Virgin Money Australia
Role
Product Manager, Researcher and Product Designer
About
The client is a financial services brand used by three independent brand-licensees worldwide. This company is Virgin Money Australia.
They were looking to develop a native mobile application (Android and iOS) that extends the customer experience for credit card customers beyond the desktop experience. The mobile application is intended to increase Virgin Money Australia’s brand and product engagement with its customers and deliver a scalable solution, increasing its competitiveness in a digitally-led financial landscape.
Phase one of the project was to deliver a Credit Card app to the market based on customers' real wants and needs. Following the first phase, features and functionality were continuously rolled out based on the defined and refined feature backlog as additional integration points became available and customer feedback was received.
I was part of an embedded, multidisciplinary, co-located team, designing and building the mobile app in a hybrid agile delivery.
Project Lifecycle
Define > Design > Develop > Test > Deploy
My Responsibilities
Competitor analysis of other banking mobile applications
Research, sketching and wireframing feature designs
Developing flow diagrams of the user’s journey
Co-creating interactive prototypes for user testing
Developing usability testing scenarios
Moderation document creation for user testing
Conducting, documenting and reporting on user testing
Creating the user stories, acceptance criteria and functional specifications for the final designs
Coordinating client feedback and amending the designs and functional specification
Developing test cases and data requirements
Reporting on the progress of development and testing
Planning and grooming the backlog of features for future phase functionality
Validating user data and API functionality and executing test cases and testing scenarios
Preparation and execution of Go-Live release
The Team
Nicky Watson (myself) / Product Manager and Product Designer
Paul Ciappara / Product Design Lead
Minh Bui / Creative Designer
The Tools
Sketching
Sketch and Flinto
Screen capture and camera software (Skype for business) during testing
Android and iOS devices for testing
Jira and Confluence
Project Process
STAGE 1 & 2:
DEFINE & DESIGN
After workshopping the requirements, the design team worked together, researching the best financial services apps and sketching design solutions—the designs aimed to be scalable and flexible to accommodate future functionality that integrates the client’s offerings.
After converting the sketches and wireframes into an interactive prototype using Sketch and Flinto, we began 3 rounds of iterative user testing. The results from each round of testing informed the iteration of the design for the app, and the final findings were presented to the client and key project stakeholders.
The final designs were used to inform the development of the functional specifications maintained throughout the project lifecycle.
STAGE 3 & 4:
DEVELOP & TEST
After completing the design phase, I remained on the project through to go-live. I was responsible for ensuring the integrity of the designs and functionality were maintained and delivered. Test scenarios and test cases were executed alongside development until Go-Live.
All changes that arose throughout development, from API or development issues, were triaged with the client and development team and redesigned to accommodate these.
