Collaborating to create awesomeness…
It always seems impossible until it’s done — Nelson Mandela
Collaboration has always been the key to any successful engagement. Especially in design, leveraging each others strengths and appreciating the value each one brings to the table always contributes towards success.
In all my years at Moonraft, Banking has been one of the key industries of focus and we have pretty much rafted along awesomely all throughout. The best banks to work with are the ones who love to explore possibilities and create a difference by pushing the limits of customer experience.
I experienced this first hand during one of our projects with Standard Bank. I had never thought that solving internet banking problem would be so much fun until I met Standard Bank.
I was working along with Standard Bank to design unified digital experience across multiple countries. Standard Bank is present in 32 countries in the world with 20 of them in Africa. It is the largest bank in Africa. Maintaining brand & design consistency across these countries was a monumental task, especially since user behavior across these countries were vastly different. Our user behavior research findings reflected different usage patterns, design preferences, and service requirements between these countries. The output design had to be something which was simple, yet addressed this problem of diversity.
Moonraft + SBG 1 Design Team
Standard Bank Group (SBG) has an amazing in-house design team. Tracy, farai madzima, Hannah, Rhyn and Senna were their core team for this project.
From Moonraft Apoorv, Umesh and I traveled to Johannesburg to join hands with them and became a global team to solve a global challenge.
Challenge accepted!
Working as a team to design for simplicity and scalability
One of the things that we were sure about was the fact that we wanted simplicity to be at the core of our design. As a team, we believed that simplicity was the key to effective design and we wanted to approach this the same way. We had the additional challenge of working on top of a core banking system which was extremely complex to work with. But we stuck with the decision to make the design as simple and minimal as possible.
A ‘One Page Banking’ approach was something we wished to pursue. We realized that 20% of the services accounted for 80% of the customer transactions, hence we decided to group those 20% in the ‘one page banking’ screen. We also identified that people didn’t want to scroll between pages during their banking transactions, so the key functions needed to be in one single page.
We ended up making almost 30–40 prototypes just for just one payment flow as we realized that cracking the payment flow would make the rest of it much easier. Finally, farai madzima, head of experience design -SBG, had one simple idea inspired from material design which was an absolute winner. Based on it, we designed 3 templates which could easily scale for any banking functionality.
Visual design was the next big thing we need to address. There were certain constraints which we needed to keep in mind.
- It needed to be scalable across all 16 countries in Africa
- It needed to be very light so that the screens could load faster
- It needed to look clean and minimal
- It needed to be responsive across all devices
The first point was to scale across the countries in Africa. Each and every country had different visual tastes. All their products also reflected the same, including websites too! For eg., our first project was in Nigeria. Nigerians love green and yellow, which were their national flag colors as well. People came up with ideas to introduce country-specific colors along with Standard Bank colors(checkout the mood-board above). However, while we understood the importance of their style preferences, we also figured that they were people who liked simplicity in every walk of life. We took a bold stance to stray away from bright colors and go ahead with simple layouts, colors and design.
Within minutes of going live, the internet and social media was abuzz with praise. Twitter streams were full of praise, Facebook likes kicked in, people even blogged about the design and how awesome it was. (Read the detailed review here)
This was another example of how close collaboration between the design teams of the vendor and the client can result in superlative output. We have many more rollouts coming up across countries in Africa…and I can’t wait for them to happen!
