Design Principles
There are some principles that the design team of Deutsche Bank stands for and tries to implement into the projects as much as possible:
User centered decisions: center all the decisions focused on our customers and avoid decisions coming from a waterfall approach from money or hierarchy driven decisions.
Intuitive Navigations: the navigation should be clear and easy to use to avoid unnecessary explanations and complex steps that might end with user frustration.
Accessibility: besides the consideration on target sizes of the components and legibility of the content the team always tries to go one step forward and conduct accessibility tests and features like voice-over to improve our products.
Consistency through channels: always keep the coherence and consistency in the experience of the products and the multiple channels that those can have.
Always test to validate: continuous test and optimize the products to achieve a state of art status and make sure that all the decisions taken are valid.
Design native: use native designs always when possible. Customers are used to its components and behaviors, this will make the product easy to understand for them and faster and easier to develop for the the development teams.
Design process
The majority of the features of the apps follow the same process of design based in an Agile approach:
Most of the times the features or parts of the product that need to be implemented need to pass through business departments in order to get a definition of scope and a budget. After settling this the design team is contacted by business in order to clarify what is needed to be done.
After this clarification and the proper planning of the tasks for completing the requirements the UX Designers conduct different methodologies of research in order to validate the need of the user in the specific topic and how the market is reacting to it. For this benchmarks, user surveys, interviews and other research methods are normally used.
With the research done and having a clearer view of how to proceed it is time to conceptualize and define generic flows to understand which will be the architecture of the feature and its possible variations and errors that the user might encounter and try to simplify it as much as possible.
This task is majorly done by the UX Designers from the team and then shared with UI Designers, PO and developers to get a complete common understanding of the flow. This allows the development team to start to work on the general architecture and structure of the feature.
Once the flow is clear and accepted it is time to work on Wireframes of the flow that will be used to validate with users the research topics and its understanding. This wireframes are normally done in a low-fidelity even if there is already a usage of components close to the ones that will be used in the mock-ups and development.
Once more this task is completed by the UX Designers and normally reviewed with the UI Designers afterwards.
With the final version of the wireframes usually a first prototype is created in order to conduct some usability testing studies or showcase to the development team.
Depending on the feature, product and needs different usability testing methods are used:
Usability-Lab Studies: usability-lab testing rounds are normally performed using the usability lab of the bank with internal workers from the company or clients. These sessions are always moderated using one or multiple prototypes.
Field Studies: when there is a need to see the user in a normal environment of usage of the app there are two main approaches. The first one is Guerrilla Testing on the street or on a specific spot to go closer to the possible client environment without having a recruitment of testers first. The second method is moderated testing on Deutsche Bank branches with existing clients who have been recruited to do specific testing sessions.
Unmoderated Remote Studies: the third method is not yet operative but it is planned to start performing unmoderated remote studies with one of the main testing platforms in the market soon. This will be used to gather qualitative and quantitative information using an online platform and their recruitment processes.
With the usability testing results the wireframes are refined and a last prototype is normally designed.
Having in mind all the steps done before it is time to use the branding guidelines and apply the UI to all the native and custom components keeping the coherence in our application.
Always before implementing the UI Design a session with the design team is done in order to see possible improvements and get a shared understanding of all the features in the app. Some parts of the project are also revised by POs and business in order to verify the designs. Reiterations of design might occur at any point of the process as part of an Agile environment.
The delivery to the developers is done in an Agile continuous improvement form, meaning that the parts of each feature are designed depending on the development backlog in order to deliver designs before the team starts developing them. InVision is the used tool for delivery and communication in the bank.
The DSM
Besides the continuous implementation of new features and projects inside DB Mobile, there are always internal topics related with design. One of the most recent and important of this topics is the implementation of an own Design System using InVision's DSM tool.
This system wants to achieve having various shared libraries where the structure and communication of the product is clear and easy to use. This will help already working designers of the project to have coherence in their designs while speeding the process of design. Furthermore, it is a perfect introductory guide for new designers that will become colleagues in the future.
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