BARCLAYS

Launchpad

Launchpad is a sidekick to Barclays' main mobile banking app. It's used to test new features with a closed user group.

iOS & Android apps

My Role

During my 1.5 years on Launchpad, I was the lead designer for both iOS and Android. This role was an exciting mix of UX and UI as part of an agile scrum team. My role was to work closely with the Product Owner in defining new ways of working as we developed a streamlined workflow to take features on the roadmap from inception to release. Working closely with the product owners and HLDs, we produced a set of journeys and userflows that clearly referenced the user-stories and acceptance criteria to ease development. These UX documents were then uploaded to Confluence where the visual designs were added in priority order. All updates were documented with a detailed change log. Within a few months, this new process streamlined the team and helped to increase release frequency. An efficiently managed ‘one source of truth’ helped to link up QA, front-end developers, Gateway developers, Pen. testers, Legal and Security in a more seamless way.

This was a challenging role but very satisfying to be involved in a new process, to challenge the status-quo and introduce a step-change. This was a role that went beyond just UX and UI design and gave me insights into all the aspects of native app development within a financial institution It was personally a very rewarding role where I was able to challenge and question existing user interaction, introduce new visual design and branding elements and to be part of a team that was actually becoming agile as the months progressed.

Finance coach

Finance Coach was a chatbot-style feature I worked on at a time when creating insights using customer data was a pretty new idea in the banking world. This was a 'first go' at seeing how a third-party solution would integrate with the banks existing data pool. We inherited a lot of styles from an existing database and were limited to using an off-the-shelf graphing library, so we couldn't fully realise our ambitions. Categorisation was also out of our control, but facing the limitations we achieved a pretty sophisticated solution.

Launchpad rebrand

When I started on Launchpad, I inherited an app with very little in the way of branding or identity. It was loosely using the main Barclays visual style. I pushed to change this. I redrew the rocket logo from the previous rather rudimentory version. I also created a custom logotype. This was the first time Barclays had allowed a sub-brand to have its own identity. It was a first to use all uppercase for a branded product and also to deconstruct the bank's bespoke typeface and remove parts of the characters. We had to challenge Brand for several months, but finally they approved my designs. Result!

Another first was introducing animation into the app. I worked very closely with the lead iOS developer to create animations for the onboarding journey as well as a procedurally generated star field as the rocket launches.

INNOVATION TAB

Pay Day calendar

Pennies roundup

Biometrics

Chatbot

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