Citi Bank

Lead designer on the Enable domain.

What I do at Citi

As a lead designer/ACD on the Enable team, I am responsible for the management and design of all mobile projects within the native apps, advocating for a user-centered experience and maintaining a consistent and cohesive 'look and feel.'

A typical project, whether I am leading the design concept or overseeing it, will follow this path:

Kick-off:

This initial meeting with our product partners sets the stage for the project. Here, we gather all of the requirements, ask clarifying questions and consume any research the product teams have put together. Being a multi- national bank, personas are difficult to put together, but we can understand where the user may be within the overall Citi experience. Understanding where they are, where they've been and where they are going is integral in creating a smooth, connected user experience.

Work:

Now that we have the requirements from our product partners, we get to work. This includes looking at the existing experience holistically, understanding the bigger picture and how our project fits into it. Next, we layout the happy path journey flow. What steps will the user need to take to complete an action successfully? How will our users interact with whatever we create?

From there, we do our own competitive/comparative analysis. Always asking questions: How are others solving similar problems? Is there room for improvement? Are these established patterns?

There are scheduled check-ups with the greater design team and product to ensure we are hitting all of the requirements, and pushing back on requirements that do not align for the best user experience.

Testing:

After putting together a few concepts, we narrow our scope. What are the two or three designs we feel solve the problem most intuitively? We bring these to usability testing.

Testing can come in two forms, either information gathering (usually done prior to 'work') or usability testing of the work in progress designs. This is where we find out if our creative is in line with what users expect and need. We are currently using Sketch and Invision, and would have prepared clickable prototypes for the testing session.

We do work with a 3rd party testing firm, so before any testing session, a brief is created and a hand-off is scheduled. During that hand-off, it is the designers job to ensure they understand fully what we are testing and data we are looking to collect.

Iterations:

Now that we have some real data straight from the users, we work to apply that feedback to the designs. I am always for retesting, but it all depends on the amount of time we have before the delivery deadline.

Tech Handoff:

Once we have the vote of approval from the users, and the green light from product, we move schedule the tech hand-off.

The tech handoff is to ensure our development partners understand what they are building. Here we answer any questions and ensure they have every asset needed to complete the project. Everyone is happy. The project is on time.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

🔥 WORK, WORK ,WORK 🔥

Account Linking

Allowing users to manage all of their accounts from one user ID.

Some Citi Bank customers have multiple accounts with different User IDs. Instead of logging in with one user ID and seeing each of their accounts, these users would have to log in to multiple different accounts.

We wanted the user to 1. recognize that they have multiple accounts and 2. give them a way to easily link all of these accounts to one user ID.

Instead of guiding the user to a flow, we landed on a single tile that contained the entire account linking process.

Our testing data showed that users appreciated how quick and easy the linking process was, and enjoyed the mini animations included.