Strategic Thinkingwhat it means at the designer’s level

A few years into a mobile banking project, in 2017, we were staring at a number we hated: users were abandoning the transfer and remittance screen in significant numbers. The moment we had the drop-off figures, I pulled the team together, the researchers and the visual designers, and we did the obvious thing. We looked at the screen and decided it was too dense.

It was a reasonable diagnosis. The recipient account sat at the top, beside a prompt to add or create one. Then an account selector, which for customers holding several accounts was already a lot to take in. Then the transfer “mode”, which for remittance shifted from one destination country to the next. Then the purpose of the transfer, and a code for its type. A long, puzzling list, and every item on it had a solid reason to be there.

So we did what design teams do: we iterated. We agreed on the arrangement we thought was cleaner and shipped it, more than once. The numbers came back each time only slightly better. Two or three releases in, the drop-off had barely moved and we had run out of things to rearrange.

Only then did we humble ourselves and commit to focused research on the flow. We recruited several groups across age, gender, and app literacy, and put half a dozen variants in front of them, each built from components and patterns we had already tested elsewhere. The researchers and visual designers put real work into it. It felt like a burden at the time, because the whole effort sat inside a bank-wide push to move customers onto the app, and here we were slowing down.