Designing Fintech for Social Impact
Client
BNG Bank
Role
UX Design lead
Industries
Finance
Date
2019 - 2022
Creating a new customer centered portal
The banking sector is innovating at lightning speed. As the largest bank for public institutions, BNG Bank naturally cannot stay behind. That’s why the market leader wanted a completely new customer portal. Design and development went hand in hand in the search for ultimate user-friendliness, more efficient business processes, and lower costs. BNG Bank’s clients are public institutions: governments and organizations involved in housing, healthcare, education, energy, and infrastructure. To achieve their social objectives, these parties use the financing solutions offered by BNG Bank.
User research and human-centered process
The initial phase of the project focused on extensive customer research and a well-thought-out design guidelines. We consistently took a human-first approach. Research results revealed that users wanted more control to handle things quicker and more easily themselves. We distilled our findings into three key designprinciples: relevance, simplicity, and clarity. Our first step to achieve this was to significantly reduce existing content. We eliminated jargon, overly detailed explanations, complex overviews, overcomplicated forms, and unneccesary unstructured content. By breaking down complex matters, only the most relevant information is now displayed. Quite a difference.
Reducing workload
The organizations that are clients of BNG Bank have so-called customer administrators, employees who manage their colleagues’ user rights in Mijn BNG Bank client portal. Previously, these customer administrators depended on BNG Bank for many actions. By transferring certain functions from BNG Bank to the administrators, they can now create and manage teams, roles and responsibilities themselves. This groundwork paved the way for a client portal where customers can view purchased products and ongoing loans, including user authorization and other related management tasks.
A calm, task-driven user experience
To reflect the established design principles we kept the color palette limited, with recognizable navigation cues integrated into the design. Combined with specific interactions, this creates a calm, task-driven user experience that helps users maintain a clear overview. You immediatly understand where you are within your task and where the interaction is taking you. Together with clear typography, well-organized information, WCAG requirmeents and accessible financial language, this results in an delightfull user experience. The design system also makes it much easier to continue testing and implementing improvements.
Design System
A clear definition and coherent structure between all elements of the design system contributed to a simple foundational design. The design system turned into a solid foundation to build upon, both within the customer portal and for other BNG Bank products. The design system consolidates and documented all design components, patterns, and animations. Designers and developers can instantly see the status of components, whether in progress or yet to be developed, which greatly facilitated the handoff to development. For product owners and analysts at BNG Bank, the system also offers valuable insights into all UX properties.
Personal reflection
We created a good onboarding process to provide customers with an overview and insights into their data and financial products, digitalizing internal and external processes, streamlining application processes and form submissions. There was also plenty of room for improvement in terms of the user experience. For example, clients had no visibility into the status of their products and services, pending applications, registrations, or requests. Additionally, nearly all changes had to be submitted by email, and processes like credit applications depended on multiple manual steps.