Helping Tangerine Bank turn their 2.2M clients into everyday bankers.
Tangerine
My work with Tangerine started in 2015 when I led a small six week project to imagine the future of banking. Over the next four years I expanded the relationship and led a large team of designers and developers to rebuild of their online banking experience, from the ground up.
Creating a new banking experience at scale
Tangerine is a mid-sized Canadian bank that started by offering high interest savings accounts and was steadily growing a portfolio of products to offer their customers a complete banking experience. Tangerine developed a strategy that would defend against commodification by catalyzing its clients to become their best financial self. I led a team that shaped the strategy and brought it to life through design, testing and implementation.
Many voices
The first challenge was to align many voices within the bank into a singular direction with achievable goals. Our team worked with Tangerine’s business, technology, and marketing teams as well as outside partnerships to bring coherence to the vision through design. We also managed dozens of internal stakeholders, and conducted weeks of intensive testing and evaluation sessions with users.
Through our efforts Tangerine asked us to expand our work to include the primary marketing and visitor’s website experiences. Over 150 people were part of the process with our team serving as both mediators and the singular source of truth. I am proud to have become a trusted advisor to our client by exceeding expectations and adapting to their needs throughout our engagement.
User Testing
We used click-through Invision prototypes to demonstrate the overall flows from sign-up and account opening to daily use and notifications. I led weeks of research sessions in Canada where we asked users to attempt to complete various tasks and observed their behaviors, making changes to improve our design.
Functional prototyping
I built a number of prototypes in Framer to demonstrate various interactive features for both our clients approval and to provide reference for our development team. We also built tools to show how specific features would look with real data.
We also created click-through prototypes for hundreds of features in Invision to allow rapid testing, iteration, sharing with various stakeholders and eventual developer hand-off.
Design system
When we took our initial vision for new features and started to apply it to the existing banking system, it became clear that we needed a clear source of truth to document the components of our design system for both designers and developers. We constantly refined this resource eventually connecting it directly to the Angular components created by the various development teams.
We also worked to educate Tangerine’s internal design team about the value of the design system to allow them to rapidly create new features, and helped them build best practices for when and how it was appropriate to deviate or modify a design component.
Development
The development process was unique in that we worked with two different third-party developers as well as Tangerine’s own in house engineering team. Throughout the project we worked closely with the developers to make sure the future vision for the bank was being achieved and the right trade-offs were being made.
The design system was instrumental in getting all the different parts of the organization on the same page and making sure that we were keeping track of changes and improvements as we went.
Trusted advisor
It was through listening, understanding the business, and providing meaningful solutions that I was able to forge a trusted advisor relationship with Tangerine. This relationship allowed us to push back and expand the scope of key decisions, as well as find solutions that provided the most value to Tangerine’s customers without sacrificing too much on the bottom line.
I served as the primary client contact and project lead while filling many other roles on this project. I worked hands-on to design the initial UX system, create our pattern library, build key prototypes to demonstrate solutions, and worked with other designers to expand our UX and visual system to cover every service within the bank. I also worked with our development partner through revision, integration and testing to bring the new bank to life.
Tangerine has seen a dramatic increase in multi-product customers, overall enrollments, and a reduction in turnover since the launch.
