Making banking more human for Tesco Bank customers

Tesco Bank prides itself on making its financial products and services better for as many as 1.5 million households via its mobile app. By downloading the app, customers can check account balances (securely), manage their money on the move, and round-up payments on any shopping purchases.

As an established player in the retail banking sector, Tesco Bank already had a successful mobile app available for customers which xDesign helped to build. However, given the growing competition - particularly from smaller, more nimble ‘disruptor’ banks - Tesco Bank felt the time was right to re-think and revitalise its mobile offering. In particular, the bank needed to provide customers not only with new products like its popular Clubcard Pay+ rewards feature, but also with tools; supportive financial content; and direct access to help via live chat, if it was to improve customer finances. With the aim of helping customers to manage everyday money better, Tesco Bank wanted to put its entire suite of financial products and services - from money management to insurance - at the heart of a new mobile proposition.

To provide the truly holistic thinking required, xDesign approached the client's brief by looking at it from a number of angles simultaneously. Leveraging our multidisciplinary team, we assembled a group of specialist designers, product experts and researchers to get to the very essence of Tesco Bank’s brief; its vision for the app, and the needs of its customers - now and in the future. By engaging across its various business units we facilitated stakeholder and customer conversations. This helped to build a picture of what the bank needed to do in order to bring its vision for the mobile app to life whilst better engaging customers.

With the aim of redesigning the Tesco Bank mobile app to align with the client’s customer strategy, xDesign not only developed a robust information architecture but also aligned this with a proposed product roadmap. This part of our strategy work enabled the client to see present and future needs - ensuring the redesigned app would not only stay relevant but ahead of customer needs where possible. As part of this process, xDesign conducted a number of user insight sessions designed to gauge their experiences when provided with a range of new features and navigation within several app prototypes. Based on the insight gathered, we then suggested a number of new features, designs and navigation to be built and housed in a new product roadmap. This provided Tesco Bank with a clear vision of how the app could be developed over time to stay consistent with its aims and overarching strategy.

A vital aspect of the strategy was to provide Tesco Bank with a North Star Metric (NSM) for the project. In helping to develop this, we wanted to provide the client with a single point of reference to ensure its customers’ needs were being met once the app was launched. This could then be utilised across the organisation to validate if the right decisions were being made. The NSM that was proposed by xDesign was based on a number of input metrics to create something that was multi-dimensional, simple to use and would give Tesco Bank the insight it needed to continuously improve the app - increasing its market share and customer engagement as a result.

A fundamental part of xDesign’s strategic approach was to provide Tesco Bank with the tools to inhabit the shoes of its customers over the short and longer term. To do this we created a set of ‘experience principles’ - short, inspiring statements that align people around a vision for a particular experience. Each statement was based on research, reflecting customer expectations and organisational wisdom. To help embed them we created a card game based on each principle - these based upon the words ‘Reassuring’, ‘Familiar’, ‘Thoughtful’, ‘Empowering’ and ‘Unified’. This game could help write user stories and epics but aligned to the overall experience that Tesco Bank sought for its mobile app. In taking this approach, we wanted to make sure that the principles we’d created stood the test of time and would be organically socialised among all of the key stakeholders working on the project within Tesco Bank. As one stakeholder put it, we created ‘a currency of conversation’ around the needs of customers - one that would inform future product development, design and functionality.