Designing the customer experience for LifeCheq’s customer portal using UX principles and a digital design system
LifeCheq is a South African fintech startup aiming to personalize and innovate with a strong customer-centric brand that meets the needs of financial planning for young professionals. We took their internal concept and worked with their development team to define and design the portal experience. Delivering a scalable digital design system as part of the deliverable.
Timeline
4 Months
Engagement
UX Retainer
Team
UX Designers
UX Engineers
Services offered on this project
The Challenge
Understanding the customer context, needs and goals to build a portal that is useful, convenient and a pleasure to use
We hosted workshops with LifeCheq where we unpacked the needs of each customer segment. We did this by looking at the jobs-to-be-done for each customer group. We then broke these apart into triggers + motivators and actions + expected outcomes for the various customers. This allowed us to sift through the common and unique themes that LifeCheq customers would expect when using the customer portal.
Wireframes and user flows
Mapping customer flow diagrams – establishing the business rules and key customer journeys
Creating flow diagrams allowed us to review the potentially complex journeys within the portal. These flows helped us scaffold the wireframes, consider the required interactions and select the best design patterns in order to build the customer portal.
Interface Design
Using the existing LifeCheq brand to build an interface that is friendly, useable and on-brand
We see many brands trying to apply their brand guidelines into their software and getting it wrong. Inexperienced designers can sometimes follow the brand guidelines so directly that they create an interface with usability problems – the interface can suffer from usability issues with primary and secondary user actions, just at a button colour level, the most basic of the required functionality.
For LifeCheq, they already had a beautiful brand with a wide range of colours and brand assets. We carefully selected used elements that would create a customer portal that was friendly, usable and on-brand. Then we extended that work into a scalable digital design system for the company to use.
Benefits of a design system
The process of taking wireframes to final interface design that’s 10x faster than the old way
We were meticulous in the way we built and organized our design files so that we could create final interface designs very quickly. The advantage is having a set of components that are easy to navigate and enable our UX designers to quickly mock-up new designs or update existing ones.
Design system
Improving handover from design to development using a digital design system
Using Sketch and Abstract (our design and file versioning tools of choice) we were able to handover designs to the developers at LifeCheq without concern that the front-end would contain inaccuracies or style bugs. We built the design system with components that could be inspected using design guidelines to ensure that the experience would be consistent.
Conclusion
The final results of our user experience design and digital design system will be available for LifeCheq customers in Q4 2020
The LifeCheq development team is now empowered in their product development sprints with the following deliverables from AUX studio:
- User-centred foundation with goal oriented design
- Key customer journey maps for each step of the system
- Digital design system to build the portal
- On-going UX design support for new features
