Enabling Financial Accessibility with User-friendly Banking App Features

2 min read
Nov 20, 2023 7:30:12 PM

Overview

SCB, a leading Thai bank, needed several digital products for their ‘Level Up’ personal loan services for people without a fixed income.

Our solution

We executed a platform UX design that compiled each product and service in a feature on the SCB mobile banking app. We also supported future growth by ensuring that the designs used for the ‘Level Up’ feature could be scaled up effectively by the SCB design team.

Ensured design consistency

Our innovative Design Tokens allowed changes to be transferred across the whole design system.

Empowered future growth

We offered a resource augmentation model, transferred designs to the SCB team, and consulted on future scaling.

Design component library

We enabled streamlined design processes with a centralized source of design components.

Our process

Design thinking workshops → UX research → Wireframing → Design iteration → Prototyping

We started by pinpointing the pain points of both our client and their customers through design thinking workshops.

Based on our findings and on thorough UX research, we then created a scalable design system with UX design templates that could be used to kick-start presentations, sitemaps, and a design critique workshop. We updated the old Level Up design with one that was more consistent, with new user flows and a design foundation.

To create a seamless experience for SCB’s mobile app users, our team created a sitemap template to ensure clearer and cleaner information architecture. We also provided SCB’s admin team with a tool to manage the Level UP feature, and access different data.

Furthermore, to align with the client’s goals for scalability, we created a design system with components and typography, a Design Token matrix, an estimate of work effort, and documentation to guide other designers about the system’s content and working process.

We also created a components library for our design process and the tools used in our discovery, wireframes, copywriting and mockups. Finally, this provided SCB with a design foundation to use when developing the feature further and bringing future teams onboard.

Challenges we overcame

1. Enabling future branding evolution by linking Design Tokens to the design system

Part of our task was to ensure that the SCB ‘Level Up’ banking app feature could be maintained and changed by the SCB TechX team to match future business needs.

Not only did we consult on future design practices and streamlined processes, but our innovative Design Tokens also ensured that any changes made to branding would be automatically implemented in the whole design system.

This saved SCB designers valuable time and made it easier to make future changes.

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2. A customer-friendly banking feature with greater accessibility

Applying for loans can be an intimidating and unfriendly process, especially for people without a fixed income. The Level Up feature on SCB’s banking app aimed to overcome this with a user-friendly, accessible feature. Seven Peaks designed user flows that helped SCB TechX meet these aims.

Firstly, Seven Peaks designed a process for customers to upload bank statements to increase their credit worthiness. Additionally, we provided SCB’s customers with a way to request cross-bank statements.

We also added additional functions to the feature, including gamification and coin-earning for every step taken towards paying off the loans.

We also included an e-commerce function, and provided design direction for the feature’s mascot. This ensured a seamless experience for people who needed greater financial inclusivity and a less traditional process.