Overview

BNZ’s notification feed shows customers the last three months of updates in the BNZ app, including secure messages, account notifications, important updates and tips. Customers can set up their own push notifications for things like money coming into your account or when your balance drops below a set amount. The area allows customers to find all their communication and important information from the bank in one centralised place.

Business problem…

“How do we efficiently get important information in front of customers to great effect?”

Customer problem…

“How do I make sure that I know what the right thing to do is, and feel empowered to do it?”

Background

BNZ has a growing need to ensure customers are receiving important information and obligations for compliance to capture more information of WHEN customers have received/responded. Additionally, customers are receiving increased information with a desire to personalise what they receive and have improvements on the experience through ordering and consistency of one BNZ voice. 

This feature improves efficiency as BNZ currently has many ways we communicate with customers such as SMS texts, intercom, emails and various other methods. There is an opportunity to reduce these methods, reducing costs for the bank. We can improve the system by increasing the smarts of how a customer interacts and reads a message rather than just passively sending them an email/txt. Additionally, we need to have regulatory standards that include capturing customer information. We can do this by providing safe, secure, consistent messaging where a customer can retain and review information at their leisure. Lastly, by creating a centralised space we are able to provide a great service to customers by creating a space with actionable notifications like upcoming payments. 

Users and audience

This service is available to all BNZ customers that are mobile active. As BNZ wants to turn SMS messaging off for certain messages there needs to be an alternative solution for something that is cheaper and more scalable. This also meets our obligations of keeping customers informed about the important stuff. 

Roles and responsibilities

The notification space was developed by the everyday mobile banking team. There was myself and another designer who worked alongside the design lead for the UX/UI design, we also collaboratively worked very closely with a UX researcher and a UX content writer. Since this project spanned such different areas of the bank and provided huge benefit to the business as we were solving a business problem as well as a customer problem there were many stakeholders involved. 

For this project I was involved in the initial discovery, where I worked with product owner, business analyst, engineering lead as well as having multiple experience team members involved. This workshop was a ‘push the boat out’ ideation stage. From this initial phase we did some future thinking of how this space would work and behave. I helped shape the experience through concepting, UI design and the onboarding.

Scope and constraints

The scope for the initial phase of notifications was to look at digital messaging and alerts from BNZ to a customer. The ability to ‘action’ was seen as a ‘nice to have’ and the ability to have two way communication with BNZ was out of scope for this phase. The feature still took into consideration all BNZ communication and ‘nice to haves’ initially so that it can grow as further phases are implemented. 

Discovery workshop

This workshop kicked off the project and got everyone involved in discussing the problem statement and get on the same page about why this feature was needed from both a business and customer perspective. In this session we had some customer scenarios, where we did some conceptualising around how we could solve their problems. This was blue sky thinking and while some of the solutions may not be feasible and assumption based it aimed to get us thinking out the box.

UI design

The other designer did low fidelity wireframe concepts that went into usability and I observed some of these sessions to understand how customers interacted with the prototype. I then analysed the research findings to help establish the UI for the notification feed which was the solution that gave the best experience in the sessions.

There were a few considerations we had to show: 

• Unread state

• Read state

• Navigation

• Where do the notifications go when tapped on?

Bell animation

One problem with our existing interface was that we implemented an intercom speech bubble in order to try to solve the problem of customers gaining information they need around Covid-19. By implementing this quick solution there wasn’t enough thought about how it would affect the account home screen. It obscured our quick pay and some account views which is not a good customer experience. 

I was tasked to create a bell animation for the new navigation which was placed in the top header. When a customer came into the app, it would animate with a blue circle to indicate that there was an unread message. I created this using after effects and exported it as a Lottie file. 

Onboarding usability

We ran some usability sessions with customers for the onboarding feature, additionally the UI design had also been fleshed out so it was good to validate that customers understood the feature. We ran the sessions over two days with six customers. The primary goal from this usability was to know which onboarding flow (or pieces from each) help customers better understand the notifications feed product. BNZ doesn’t have an onboarding pattern which meant that we were creating a new experience so our assumptions needed to be validated. 

From these sessions we understood that we should target the onboarding to customers who currently used SMS otherwise it is irrelevant and confusing for customers. Another theme that came out of these sessions was that the type of control is very important to customers, because while some information is important they don’t want to feel like they are being spammed.

Strategy

The final design created one trusted space which brings together four digital messaging methods and creates a timeline feed for these messages. 

What we wanted to improve:

• Customers have multiple ‘message’ platforms in different places of the app, requiring the customer to know where to go for each one. 

• The subtle design for when customers receive secure messages, causing customers to stress thinking they have missed something.

• Our intercom feature obscures quick pay and some account tiles causing frustration for customers who can't do core banking features.

• Inconsistent look and feel with messages causing customers to have uncertainty about whether it is really BNZ.

How we did it: 

• Created one trusted space for customers to come and get their digital communication so that they don’t have to work out where to go to manage information.

• Use of a consistent bell animation letting customers know at log in if they have an unread message, meaning that they aren’t missing information. 

• Removal of the intercom speech bubble and replacing it with the bell in the header space so it doesn’t obscure any key banking functionality. 

• Presented all different messages in a pattern within the feed so customers know that this is the space that customers can go back to for a history of what BNZ is sharing with them. 

Outcomes and results

The bank came to the team with a problem, we were spending too much money on SMS that customers have subscribed to. The easy fix would've been turning these off as it’s an ‘optional service’ but we addressed that they can’t remove a service without understanding why customers have subscribed in the first place. We could’ve replaced SMS with push and created an inbox for this but this still doesn’t solve the customer problem of struggling to know where to go considering we message them in so many different means. If we took an easy way out we would have created more problems than we solved, instead we had some fantastic research, usability sessions, quality design and collaboration which enabled a positive experience for customers to see and manage the information they perceive as important. 

This is the first phase of this project and I look forward to the next phase release, more customisation and flexibility for the customer to set up and edit notifications with an increased suite of messaging which I am currently working on. 

Software

Sketch, Invision, Adobe After Effects, Lottie files