Case study
Redesigning a digital banking experience from the ground up
- Company
Interfaces are reconstructed to respect client confidentiality.
The context
Redesigning a digital banking experience from the ground up.
A leading Ecuadorian bank partnered with EY to rethink its digital banking experience. A research team had already completed the initial discovery, uncovering customer needs, pain points, and opportunities across the existing experience.
Our design team took those findings into product design.
The problem
Everyday banking was harder than it needed to be.
Customers needed to complete essential tasks — checking their finances, making payments, transferring money, and managing their accounts — that had traditionally been done in person at a bank branch. Now most of those tasks were digital and handled through the banking app.
The opportunity was to rethink those journeys as one coherent, easy-to-use digital banking experience.
Why it was hard
Simple for the customer didn’t mean simple to design.
The design was especially challenging because a large share of the bank’s customers were middle-aged and not used to digital experiences. We had to tread carefully and make every single flow as easy to understand as possible.
Banking flows come with rules, validations, dependencies, edge cases, and technical constraints. The UX challenge was simplifying those journeys for customers without removing the information, controls, and feedback they needed to complete them confidently.
My role
I joined after the discovery phase, translating research findings into the product architecture and core banking journeys.
I worked as part of EY’s multinational design team to define flows, design and prototype the new experience, test it with customers, and iterate based on what we learned.
I also worked closely with the bank’s engineering team as the designs moved into development, adapting the experience to technical constraints and supporting the product through launch.
The decisions that shaped the product
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Design for people who aren’t used to digital experiences
- Decision
- Give more weight to an intuitive experience.
- Over
- Innovation for its own sake.
The redesign was an opportunity to rethink the experience around customer goals, not around being innovative or disruptive.
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Make complex flows feel simple
- Decision
- Break transactions into clear, focused steps with the right information at each moment.
- Over
- Exposing the complexity of the banking process to the customer.
Transfers, payments, and other banking operations involved significant logic behind the scenes. The interface needed to make that complexity manageable.
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Never-ending cycles of testing
- Decision
- Prototype and test key journeys with customers every single day.
- Over
- Treating the initial research as enough validation.
Research told us what needed to change; testing showed us whether the new experience actually worked. We even tested every design with our parents, uncles, and aunts. If they could understand the task, we knew we were on the right track.
The evolution
Research into journeys
Turn customer insights and pain points into the architecture and core flows of the new experience.
Journeys into a product
Design, prototype, and connect those flows into a consistent end-to-end banking experience.
Product into production
Validate with customers, iterate, and work alongside engineering to bring the experience to launch.
Outcome
From research findings to a banking experience customers could actually use.
I helped translate customer research into an end-to-end digital product, taking core banking journeys from early flows through testing, iteration, and implementation with the bank’s engineering team.
Lessons learned
Research is only the starting point.
Turning insights into a product requires making hundreds of smaller decisions the research can’t answer for you.
Simple experiences hide complexity.
The clearer a banking flow feels to the customer, the more carefully its rules, states, and edge cases have usually been designed.
Design doesn’t stop at handoff.
Working closely with engineering was essential to preserving the experience while adapting it to the realities of implementation.