As designers, how we are helping Standard Bank — South Africa, branch staff consultants
“What’s really need about service design is that if we design for people not only for the person doing the banking transaction but we have to design for the people working at the bank and that’s a skill as far as I can tell is restricted to DESIGNER.” — Don Norman, BODW, 2014
The above speech was in my mind for a very long time. But nobody took care of it. In Banking, the customer’s end design and technologies are growing so fast. But the staff side was static since Y2K. I bet just ask your banker to show their end screen & also try performing your request by yourself, and You will go and hit the wall by yourself. It is that bad, both in India & South Africa. I’m not sure of other countries.
At Standard Bank —digital platform & experience design unit, Tracy Frayne, head of design at Standard Bank, handed this project to me, I went crazy and was super excited. I was so happy that Standard Bank cared about re-designing the Staff arena. farai madzima who laid the foundation did some basic concepts of it, and he was helping Seba, Sydney & me in the business perspective. After few days, he ran away to the crazy cold country Canada to join Shopify.
We went to the different branches and its sections of the bank to observe their operations, customers problems, and staffs problem. We stood in the inquiry department near the staff from morning 9am to 3pm with 30mins of lunch break to understand their pain. We also had an opportunity to simulate staff experience, by solving our very own requests in the staff banking system (after completing the process, I did hit my head on the wall).
We came back with the data, and we tried to define their problems, and we handed over to the business to solve the problem. In this case, I again recall Don Norman’s thought that “ modern designers should be problem definers not problem solvers”. But, I think they should be able to do both if they can. In this case, we are trying to do both. We did some basic concepts with super cool interactions to cut short their validation process & speed up their top 5 tasks. We did some prototype in Framer Team and InVision for user-testing. We got some fantastic results. We iterated the design and tested a lot. We also presented to the heads. They got super excited than us. That’s the happy note. After few days, @Seba who was bridging a gap between the design & business got airdropped to Vodacom leaving us to the monk Jarrod.
The beauty of this design mission is one small change in process and interaction can have a huge impact. For one specific task right now it takes around 20–30mins. But with the new process design it can be reduced to under 10mins, also it can be reduced to 2–3mins by designing a upgraded banking system with refreshed UX & UI. Guessing the impact, the customers and staff can save a lots of time all around South Africa.
This is a big challenge for the designers, but the biggest challenge is for the tech because they have to write fresh code to replace this vintage banking model. Keep in touch, will share the work once the design is launched in the space. Wait, not the real space, I am not Elon musk :-P
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