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Bank Of The West’s Responsive Design System
The Challenge
These days, many companies face the challenge of having years of digital experiences juxtaposed with a collage of technical vendors. This inconsistent digital brand experience and tech debt often results in confused customers who are not able to quickly complete their needed online and mobile tasks.
Bank of the West was in a position where the company wished to rapidly move forward with new and innovative digital experiences but was not able to due to these challenges.
There was an immediate need to develop a reusable object oriented digital design language that would allow the digital innovation teams to rapidly develop interaction and branded customer experiences in a much more nimble fashion.
What We Did
Socialized The Need And Validated The Investment
Like many financial institutions, we were challenged with extremely tight budgets and minimal resources thus we developed a plan to demonstrate the ROI and the immediate impact of building such a system would have.
Studied Our Customer’s Digital Journey
With our effort funded, our UX research team quickly set the wheels in motion to develop our first “end to end” digital customer journey map. Our customer journey mapping efforts spanned over 60 days where our UX research team conducted many intensive design thinking sessions with our internal subject matter experts along with external moderated customer interviews. The end result was a detailed path of our customers digital journey which identified many current friction points and was accompanied with many suggestions to improve our experience.
Digital Customer Journey Design Thinking Workshop Artifact
Challenged Our Teams To Think Different
Many of our existing team members had never built nor were familiar with the concept of building a responsive design system and the value of one.
Through design thinking methods and intensive sketching sessions the team was brought up to speed in the craft and were able to begin, as a team, the creation of our first responsive design system.
In this effort we made sure to adapt an “early inclusion” model which made sure we vetted and socialized our design concepts in the very early stages to assure technical and brand alignment with our engineering and marketing partners.
Designed For Our Customer’s Needs
Our interaction designers leveraged our new informed perspective and drafted information architecture concepts, new wire frame and partnered with our research staff to validate and evolve our initial directions.
At the same time we focused on the content strategy of our new experiences in the early stage to assure were were addressing discovered friction points and proper communication to our customer’s needs.
As we were currently in the middle of a new multi-million dollar rebrand, our visual design experts solidified our new digital experience with a fine polish that incorporated all of our new interaction evolutions and clarified customer messaging.
Through a variety of moderated and unmoderated usability testing sessions, our UX research team was able to validate and recommend evolutions to our new concepts prior to engineering hand off.
ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) Training With The UX Team
Design For Accessibility
To assure we were meeting the needs of every single one of our customers, we took the time to learn the latest best design practices to assure we were ADA compliant. These training sessions proved to be very beneficial in assuring that all of our digital design team designed optimal digital experience while considering many possible vision, hearing and other physical conditional scenarios.
The Impact
Our deployed responsive design system quickly surpassed many of our initial expectations.
Within a very short window we saw as much as an 85% increase in our online account creation and a 40% reduction in the resources needed to design and deploy new digital experiences.
With this massive increase in our digital products speed to market, we also noticed an exponential lift in our online NPS (Net Promoter Score) rating accompanied by a significant call center activity reduction.
Additional Resources In Our Journey
Socializing The Need
This video communicates why we built our component library and how we addressed our business partner's and customer's needs.
The Execution Of The Artifacts
This video is a demonstration and fly through of the component library and all of it's artifacts we built in our initial launch of this effort.