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ABSA Banking

The new Absa Banking App was the start of Absa's Digital Transformation. Working within the newly formed Absa Design Office I had the opportunity to be a part of this incredible team where I learnt so much about product design and working within an enterprise agile environment.

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Role: UX Designer

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Absa website

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Date: 2015-2016

01 project challenge

Our challenge was in creating a fast, easy to use banking app for people on the go. Our goal was for someone to be able to do a payment in 30 seconds once logged in. The previous banking app was clunky and difficult to use. We wanted users to feel heard and to only put features into the app that were completely necessary.

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02 the team

  • 4 UX Designers (Android and iOS)

  • 2 UI Designer

  • 1 Product Owner

  • 1 Scrum master

  • 2 Business Analysts

  • 2 Testers

  • Windows Dev Team (Lithuania)

  • Android Dev Team (RSA and India)

  • iOS Dev Team (RSA and India)

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03 the process

SPONSOR USERS

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It is really difficult to get users into the banking buildings but more so when they need to be there during working hours. In order to mitigate this I was able to recruit a pool of users in all the areas we needed for our testing i.e credit card users, business owners, lower income staff and higher income Private Wealth clients. Sometimes when it becomes tough, you need to test when and where you can.

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DESIGN IN AN AGILE WORLD

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Design worked in Kanban with our developers working in Agile. The Designers had about a month's run up before the feature went into development which meant we had a lot of time time to research, define the problem, create, test and iterate on that feature. This does not come easy and needs the entire pre-development team determined to get as many stories ready upfront as possible.

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LESSONS

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  • The Pre-development team including, Business Analysts, CX researchers, and Designers should plan discovery of upcoming features well in advance to make sure that we are fully prepared and ready for sprint.

  • Team work and collaboration are key between designers working on the same app. Constant peer reviews prevents rework.

  • Working closely with your developers, doing frequent desk checks and reviews really helps in ensuring most UI bugs are caught before QA testing begins.

absa app.png

04 features I worked on

  • Settings

  • Account summaries

  • Insurance details

  • All about me feature (when you press your profile image)

  • Business banking

  • Manage cards

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