A multicultural homebanking

CLIENT

Intesa Sanpaolo — Subsidiary division
2014 — 2015

CHALLENGE

Design of a full multichannel home banking experience, including a website, mobile apps and in-store solutions, in 4 different countries and 3 different customer segments.

STRATEGY

2 things, really: define 5 design principles to be the foundation of the overall experience, and think modular.

CHANNELS

Responsive website, iOS app, Android app, Digital Desk (located in-store), CMS Platform.

Project Kick-off

Aim of the project was the redesign of an innovative home banking platform for Intesa Sanpaolo subsidiary banks (Croatia, Egypt, Hungary) which involved a responsive website, mobile apps and future further developments on in-store devices.

The very beginning of the project has been focused on a strong benchmark analysis, multiple stakeholders workshops to understand the vision and the definition of main personas.

Design Process

PHASE I

Initially, the design process started with a classic waterfall approach, where all wireframes were designed, then styled from UI designers and then developed. At the time, Atomic design wasn’t a thing, still.

After one year of designing, we realized that we were producing a huge amount of wireframes and interfaces (on a a tight schedule), which was ending in creating discontinuity and lacking in common patterns definition.
This last point was crucial for a project that involved 4 different banks from 4 different countries, multi-device, with so many functionalities!

PHASE II

We realised that we needed to change our design methodology, having a central library to reference at, and decided to migrate all designs on Sketch, which started being popular at that time, and apply the atomic design principles.
This decision has not been easy, since the project timeline didn’t allow the team to stop designing, but at the same time we needed some time for the transition.

So, instead of redesigning every file we had from scratch, we started using Sketch for all the new designs, in order to respect the schedule and at the same having the occasion to start the foundation of the library.

While we were learning the tool and its logics, we also focused on a more modular design, already rethinking some components — having already done 1 year of layouts, the team had in mind all the components and this allowed us to redesign some of them and be more flexible.

Slowly, every time we had to rework an old layout, instead of reworking it with the old Omnigraffle, we redesigned it with Sketch already including the necessary reworks.

It hasn’t been a short transition, but at the end of the phase we ended up having half of the modules and a more consistent interface.

The team also directly benefit from that, using the same design tool.

Multichannel, multicultural,
multisegment

Cultural differences between the 3 countries have been address for the whole duration of the project. While in Europe sharing economic resources within the family may sound ok, it’s not the same for Egypt, where the family concept is different. Also, due to the arabic language, an RTL interface has been designed for Egypt.

Also language has been an important aspect of the design process, since Hungarian is one of the most complex language in the world having some of the longest words, while arab is oppositely very short.

For example, “Terms & Conditions” translates into:

• Felhasználási feltételek in Hungarian

• الأحكام والشروط in Arabic

Designing for 3 customer segments means also thinking at nuances in the way to communicate with them, including differences in all copywriting and interactions.