I was seconded to Lloyds Banking Group for over a year whilst working at Publicis Sapient. Working across multiple brands including Halifax, Bank of Scotland, MBNA, and Scottish Widows. With over 15 million active app users, Lloyds places a strong emphasis on user-centric design, which has been crucial to the success of projects to close the gap between the neo-banks.
The work that I was a part of during my time on Lloyds is still in build and under NDA however I have touched on my process, success metrics and my overall thoughts below.
The Notifications team was responsible for managing app notifications. Ensuring that all notifications were user-friendly, engaging, and insightful.
As a product designer on the NASA team, I was responsible for collaborating closely with key stakeholders, ensuring that the user experience was usable and accessible for all. Through research sessions, the team and I identified user pain points to enhance and improve the native app experience. I was also in charge of visual design where I ensured designs were deployment-ready and aligned with the developers' requirements.
million + active app users across the Lloyds Banking Group brands.
million notifications are sent out to LBG customers every week.
We were enhancing the notifications experience for users by modernising them with expanded and enriched features, celebrating key events like Payday through notifications, and offering personalised and customisable options to create a more engaging and tailored experience.
Saved annually through the work we did on notifications.
call centre hours reduced weekly due to less account queries solved through notifications.
I’ve gained a deeper understanding of notifications. I’ve learnt about how they work, why they’re important to an apps success and what the future of notifications could look like. From an experience perspective I also gained a deeper insight on how keeping multiple archetypes in mind is important to create a delightful and usable experience for all. I really enjoyed working with and talking to customers to help solve their pain points and gathering valuable insights to help design for all.
The aim of the money management team was to reduce the mental load of day to day banking, helping customers make intelligent money decisions.
The spending insights feature was built several years ago and categorised customer spending into relevant buckets e.g groceries and eating out. We were tasked to push it further by leveraging data to give customers a fuller more accurate view of their spend.
The problem users identified was that the tool wasn’t insightful enough to help manage and stay on top of their spend.
Our plan was to build on the spending insights feature. By adding more insights driven by data, we could really make an impact to a customers view of their spend. Highlighting data points such as: frequency of spend, average spend in a month and merchant visits.
As a product designer on the team, I worked through the discovery, design and testing phases to find how data points could be leveraged to better the spending insights feature . I did a lot of exploration on data visualisation, looking at competitors and seeing how they were displaying and using data. We also planned to have a user testing session so I designed a working prototype in Figma to facilitate the session.
Understand your vision and get the whole team behind it.
Get hold of data early and get experts in to help.
Likewise with accessibility. Consider all our users earlier than you think.
“Saf provides fresh thinking and well considered responses to design problems. Whilst maintaining ownership of the visual design aspects of a project, he understands the interplay between UX and UI making him a weill-rounded designer, capable of contributing to design conversation and ideation at all stages of a project.
He has worked on several projects at Lloyds Banking Group and has shown a flair for working independently and in a team.”