Company: ank, 4.4 star rating (10.1K reviews), 100K+ Downloads (20.10.2020)
Role: Head of Design and User Research, founding member
Dates: March 2019 - November 2020
Making Argentines happier for bringing all bank accounts into one app
Situation
In 2019 the user experience of a lot of Argentine home banking apps was just horrible. It was too difficult to send money from one bank to the other from the native bank apps. Even when you just wanted to move money from your bank account at one bank to your bank account at another bank. So we created a wallet app that allowed to the users to send money from one bank account to another bank account. No matter if you're the owner of the accounts or you just want to send money to a friend. A flawless experience within seconds.
Task
We had to research the digital readiness and to investigate the consumers’ mental model around payments in general.
Same time the recently born start up needed a design process and org and culture. Same time in which tech and product teams were building their own processes and organisations we needed to define proactively integrated work process based on agile sprints.
Additional I found myself in a position as the most senior designer to accompany the design director from the consulting company to find and choose local product designers.
Actions
Research: Running qualitative and quantitative research to understand which were the biggest pain points for users to send and to receive money. Also we ran moderated and unmoderated user tests with prototype of the ank application on mobile phones to observe and understand user behavior.
Design: Coordinating the brand design executed through the external creative agency DHNN . Leading and mentoring a small team of internal designers and user researchers.
Mentorship: Leading the designer and user researcher ensuring personal growth. Motivating to compete with International benchmarks and local banks.
Processes: Our aim was the creation product design processes based on a small and agile design team to ensure fast iteration process during the first two years of the product.
Organization: We wondered if a small design team could cope with a bigger and fast moving tech team. Hiring was difficult since huge local fintech corporates were permanently looking for new design talents. Additional the local banks were starting a digitalization process which included the hunt for product designers and user researchers during the same time frame.
Key take aways
A stunning user experience can not be the only USP comparing a product/service to existing benchmark.