Role & Responsibilities

Experience Design Director

As an integral part of a large international programme I co-led a 30 strong, multi-agency creative department, providing strategic design leadership and direction to define a ground-up digital banking platform.

Activities

  • Brand development
  • Experience strategy
  • Design governance
  • Journey mapping
  • Concepting
  • Information Architecture
  • Wireframing & prototyping
  • User testing
  • Data visualisation
  • UI, interaction & motion design

Approach

Experience Design

Based in a dedicated project office away from HSBC HQ, I helped build and oversee a number of creative teams to deliver the Kinetic brand, app and website.

These teams were responsible for the experience design of specific sections of the app, supported by a central team of Lead UX and UI Designers, Researchers, Developers, Copywriters and Accessibility Consultants who provided input and governance in the form of the app information architecture, experience design principles, styleguide, toolkit and component library.

Approach

Information Architecture

Release-specific app maps helped to keep delivery teams of aware of the overall structure and functionality of the app, as well as ensure consistency in navigation taxonomy and iconography.

Extensive flows were produced for each app feature and section, and set out the optimal user experience whilst accommodating specific business & regulatory requirements.

Approach

Design Toolkit

The design toolkit, whilst managed centrally, was developed in collaboration with all creative teams. Daily design standups, design reviews and department meetings helped the ongoing evolution of the toolkit.

Updates were accompanied by briefings to ensure that all teams had the most up-to-date materials and knowledge to use in their day-to-day work. A live component library was also created, providing developers with ready made assets that exactly mirrored the toolkit, ensuring utmost consistency between design and build.

Every conceivable aspect of the app was covered, from experience principles, individual elements, page templates, component states & rules, fonts, colours, motion, iconography, and tone of voice.

This collaborative approach allowed teams to help and inspire each other as the app grew and became more complex.

Approach

User Testing

The design process was driven by a comprehensive programme of user testing, designed to understand customer perceptions, expectations, and behaviours as well as validate hypotheses and inform design iterations.

Bi-weekly moderated test sessions were augmented by ad-hoc, guerrilla testing in order to capture rapid feedback in response to specific design ideas and questions.

Card sorting and tree testing activities also helped to define an overall structure for the app and menu systems.

Results

Following it’s full public launch HSBC Kinetic has attracted thousands of new clients, and has an App Store rating of 4.7.

As the one of the first major successful scaled-agile program within the bank, Kinetic informed a unified product vision, and served as a watershed moment in new ways of working and best practice implementation of modern technology tools.

Thanks to the streamlined onboarding experience, HSBC have been one of few banks able to support new businesses for time-sensitive Bounce Back (COVID) loans.