Fintech I
A joint collaboration to enhance an online banking app for the Canadian market
Challenge: Key challenges included miscommunication, weak component architecture, limited user testing, and lengthy reviews, hindering alignment, efficiency, and user focus.
Role: Principal of Product Design
Enhancing a Canadian Online Banking App Through UX Research
This project was a joint collaboration aimed at improving the user experience of a third-party digital banking app brought in by the client for the Canadian market. However, when I joined, it was clear that several challenges were slowing down progress:
- Miscommunication across teams
- Lack of design system, making scalability difficult
- Limited user testing, leading to design decisions without real validation
- Lengthy review cycles, which hindered efficiency and alignment
The Product Design team was tasked with improving the user experience while working closely with vendors, business analysts, and stakeholders. Our focus was to ensure that, despite the technical and business constraints, the user’s needs remained the top priority.
Approach
Since I was joining a year into the project, I quickly realized that one of the biggest gaps was a lack of direct user insight. To address this, I kicked off user research initiatives to inform and validate our design decisions. This included:
- User Interviews – To understand pain points, behaviors, and expectations
- Usability Tests – To evaluate how users interacted with the app and identify friction points
- Journey Mapping – To visualize user flows and uncover gaps in the experience
Design System
As we established a rhythm with our research, we shifted our focus to developing a design system. This system ensures consistency and efficiency by providing standardized guidelines and reusable components across different parts of the product. Alongside two other product designers, we audited and catalogued the entire product, presenting our findings internally and to leadership. This growing system helps teams maintain a cohesive user experience and accelerates the design and development process.
Outcome
Better alignment across teams, reducing miscommunication and inefficiencies
More informed design decisions, backed by real user data
Stronger UX improvements, focusing on usability and accessibility for Canadian banking users