Nedbank
MoneyTracker

Project breakdown and process

We followed the Client Centred Design (CCD) process developed by the digital team at Nedbank, based on best practices observed around the world. While the full CCD process is lengthy and has many steps, making it consumable for any project, below or the main key steps in the process that I focus on.

Pitchbook, desk research and SME engagement

Research and discovery phase

Prototyping and regular testing of iterations with users

Build and deploy BETA

Go live

Commercialise

Continue to iterate, maintain and expand the functionality based on user data

Toolset of choice

My role as the design lead

I was charged with overseeing and contributing to a team of 2 designers, UI and UX.

As the Design Lead, my role also involved contributing towards the strategy and overall direction of the project from a user experience perspective, always advocating for the end-user.

When this mandate came into conflict with business needs I was charged with negotiating on behalf of the design team, defending the project from poor decisions, and making sure that a fair trade-off was made.

The product owner, technical lead, business analysts and I were always present when making strategic decisions. As the design lead, I contributed towards determining which features would make it onto the MoneyTracker tool.

I was expected to make sure that the project adopted the client-centred design approach that Nedbank had developed for delivering high-quality digital products at scale.

I also had to make sure that the design team and its processes were well integrated into the greater team and its agile approach. 

I was responsible for maintaining a good cadence and quality of the design team’s output as the agile environment was a fast passed and fluid one. 

In order for us to reach our goal of landing this ambitious project, we would need to put our solution through its paces in a live environment with real data. Transactional and user feedback data. A year after kicking off we were ready for a closed internal pilot, allowing us to open up our solution to Nedbank Staff and get direct real-world feedback from users. This was an important step towards validating our technology and user experience solutions and gathering crucial data about the performance of the categorisation algorithm and the usability issues.

We put in place an action plan to review, consolidate and prioritise the refinements we wanted to make based on the user feedback collected during the pilot, and start getting ready for our open BETA. A first for the Nedbank Money app and online banking platform. This was an important step, and we knew that even though we were released as a beta that this was going to be our first opportunity to make a positive and impactful impression on those users why gave it a try. 

MoneyTracker was out in the wild and we were getting incredible feedback from our end users. Much of the feedback was very positive, but it was the negative and constructive feedback that was my focus as this is where I find many of the most critical comments and suggestions. This data would help us refine the product even further and continue to add richness to its functions based on user feedback.

By the time we came out of beta, we were confident that we were delivering a valuable and important product to our customers and we were excited to continue expanding on its capabilities for the months to come.

FINAL PRODUCT