ID verification without breaking the bank

One of the largest Australian banks was in the process of enhancing their digital capabilities under the umbrella of their Digital First strategy which included an uplift of their online ID Verification processes for both individual and business customers.

I was brought in to create enhancements to multiple ID Verification flows, finding myself in a web of interconnected modules, stakeholders, legal requirements and a tight 3 months deadline to reduce the 50% new customer drop-out rate and deliver a vision for the business verification experience.

Imagine joining a project that is the connecting tissue between multiple initiatives with multiple requirements, users, use cases, touchpoints and domains, and being tasked to create a simple solution that works for all of them.

That’s the situation I found myself in, and there was no time to lose to get up to speed and create a project plan that would ensure the delivery of said solution by the end of a three-months engagement.

I started by creating a stakeholder map across departments and teams to get an overview who is involved to what capacity.

Working hand-in-hand with a bank’s designer (who also played my personal tour guide to get to know the who-is-who and what-is-what in the organisation), I audited the work that had been done so far on the project. This included user flows, updated and outdated screens, testing results and proposed improvements of the existing experience.

Gathering insights from stakeholders I created an updated flow that we would put in front of users to test. This gave us the opportunity to uplift outdated existing screens to the latest version of the Design System.

As it happens in big organisations, priorities and scopes often change. And this shouldn’t be any different. We had to abandon our business verification flow and focus solely on the verification part of the project. A piece involving document uploads was now our focus.

Conversing with BA’s we identified key screens in the flow whose redesign would have the biggest impact on reducing drop-out rates.

At least, in theory. As it turns out, communication isn’t always a component’s forte and we had to navigate various legal and technical hurdles to arrive at our proposed solution. We built another prototype and got to the testing this time proving most of our assumptions.

We recommended a set of improvements to multiple parts of the flow that would be integrated gradually, significantly improving the user experience.

Proven to be a key blocker during our testing sessions, we could even reopen the conversation to simplify the Terms & Conditions screen with the legal department which led to the creation of several possible solutions that would be explored in a follow-up.

While working on different files across different teams I noticed inconsistencies documenting files, changes and designs across the board. And the Design System didn’t provide solutions.

As a side project I developed a POC for a file naming and structuring convention involving changes, briefing, purpose and status of the project at hand. This would help with consistency, speed of design and development and reduce misunderstandings between teams and team members.

I presented the concept to the GEL teams as well as senior stakeholders in the business opening the door to work on this piece in an upcoming stage.