My Role
UI/UX Design, User Research, Prototyping
Team
Santander UX Design Team
Timeline
June 2022 - August 2022
Tools
Figma, Userzoom, UsabilityHub
Business Problem
Mobile banking users are unaware of where they can manage their alert settings from within the app. This might lead to complaints of CSC phone calls.
How Might We…
How might we mitigate the process to manage one’s alert settings to be more intuitive and clear for our users?
Context
During my internship, the overflow menu (three dots) was the only place a user could tap to manage their alert settings.
User Research
To understand our customer's current pain points, I conducted a first click test using UsablityHub.
I set up our 35 participants with the following scenario and screen:
“Where would you tap to change your alerts settings to email only?”
Test Screen
Post-test survey
Only 11% of participants were confident in their choice
Heatmap
The overall task difficulty scores indicate that the current path to managing one’s alert settings is not clear to our users.
34% of the participants rated the task to be moderately difficult
Following the rating portion of the questionnaire, we asked users to elaborate on why they decided to tap where they did. From these results, we discovered the following insights:
Users who tapped correctly (on the overflow menu) justified their choice by using prior knowledge or by guessing
Users who tapped incorrectly justified their choice based on what they expected to see/ what they read
Prototype Test
Understanding our users expectations and overall ease of the current user flow.
Similar to the previous test, we used UsabilityHub and set up our 10 participants with the following scenario:
“Please change the phone number that is assigned to your security alerts in the Manage Alerts Settings.”
Only 30% of participants were able to make it to the goal screen.
Given the number of misclicks, there was a clear indication that the overall alert experience was very confusing. For the next steps, we decided to conduct secondary market research to learn more about best practices for alerts.
Insight #1
Users expect an option to change their phone number in the dropdown.
Insight #2
Users associate managing their alert security phone number with ‘Security’ or ‘Profile".
Market Research
We looked at 9 other banking competitors.
For this final portion of my research, we conducted a competitive analysis, mainly focusing on uncovering the gap between Santander and it’s competitors. We saw this key insight as an opportunity to re-evaluate our information architecture to be more consistent with users’ mental models.
5/9 Competitors had ‘Manage Alert’s under their ‘Profile & Settings’ menu
Key Themes
I consolidated my research findings into 3 themes to realign business objectives with user needs:
Location
Users are unable to successfully manage their alert delivery options because they don’t know where to find them.
Simplification
Users who failed to complete the prototype test gave up because they had to tap through an overwhelming amount of steps (that were not clear).
Consistency
Our current information architecture does not align with users’ expectations about where to find things (i.e. Manage Alerts).
Design Explorations
Remove overflow menu (3 dots)
Based on similar user behavior related to bill pay, we decided to surface the alert delivery options. We also implemented a third tab for alert delivery options.
2. Adding an Additional Entry Point
Users expect to be able to manage their alert settings by clicking on a specific account. Adding this feature allows for more flexibility and error prevention.
3. Consolidate the Side Navigation
Reorganizing the information architecture in this way aligns better with users’ expectations and mental models. This new design allows for more clear and intuitive navigation,
4. Removing the ‘Add’ Phone Number Dropdown & Button
Users expect to be able to add a new phone number in the dropdown. Our current state only allows users to add a new phone number by tapping on the ‘ADD’ button. I decided to remove this feature to allow for error prevention.
Retrospective
Key Learnings & Takeaways
Throughout my internship, I learned a handful of key lessons:
The importance of writing strong user tests - it’s not only important to establish clear tasks, but also to avoid bias
How to develop recommendations that are insightful and specific
Creating a strong narrative is essential - think about how your stakeholders might interpret your findings
If I had more time
Given my limited time at Santander, I was only able to work on a limited number of projects. Although I was able to contribute a fresh and insightful amount of work to the mobile banking alert experience, I recognize that there is still so much work to do; this is only the beginning. If I had more time I would have loved to redesign the account alert screen and security alerts screen. Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the experience that I had at the company and for the work I was able to put forth.