Glance

Always-on, continuous experiences surround us. They are the very fabric of how we relate to friends, family, our jobs and more. We rely on real-time information to inform, to entertain and to deliver experiences in the moment. This is only becoming more prevalent especially in a post pandemic world. Banking has, so far, missed the always-on revolution. Glance is our attempt to change this. 

To engage in this space we explored existing frameworks, industry reports, and localized company research to align with adjacent spaces to spin up empathy and content testing to probe the slightly uncomfortable space around always-on finances.

Problem

• Am I OK?

We defined the problem to solve as those moments where you quickly need to be sure that you’re ok. We’ve all experienced being in the check out line and suddenly doubting our account status. We wanted users to be able to quickly check their balance without the sometimes cumbersome task of logging in.   

We asked ourselves…
What if a customer taps the app icon and is presented with actionable insights on a dashboard and only needs to sign in when actions require more security?

Using customer data, we could surface instant shortcuts for immediate engagement.

Audience
Ideally we wanted everyone to use this tool, whether you’re our upscale Upmarket customer or average Main Street customer. But for MVP we decided to focus on our more tech savvy users that were typically early adopters and skewed to our younger demographic.

Team Participants

• Product manager
• Content strategist
• Product owner
• Design
• API orchestration team
• Android development team

Acceptance Criteria
MVP represents the glanceable information that informs customers as to the state of their finances with us. In a broad sense, this is red/yellow/green. Do you need to stop what you’re doing? Do you need to keep a close eye on things? Or are you good to go? We’d provide a general view that would be discrete and show only your financial values.

Secondly, it should support our mission, to change banking for good by validating our promise to look out for you

Known Insights

• What Dashboard of useful insights delivered concisely/visually
• Why Confidence in decision-making moments, validate or our promise to look out for you 
• How API delivered content

Needs

Alignment of technology, vision and evolving customer patterns.

• Effortless
  Sign in transparency
• Innovative
  Timely and contextual
• Deepen and enrich relationships

Competitor Analysis

We found several that were also providing a limited amount of account information in an opt-in pre-authenticated space. However, the user experience of these flows were rather lackluster. They provided that immediate balance information but they stopped there.

Well Fargo (1 of 3)

Well Fargo (2 of 3)

Well Fargo (3 of 3)

Simple

Fidelity’s Opt In

We pulled in business partners, product managers, data analysts along with our content strategist, we began white boarding concepts seeking an answer to these questions: 

• What might a user want to see in an unauthenticated space?
• What would be comfortable?

After several sessions, we settled on four distinct approaches. These were a full screen, with swipeable rows, a tooltip overlay on the login screen, a series of dialogs overtop the login screen and a full screen with a stacked card collection. 

At the time we were still in the middle of developing our design

system so there was an opportunity here.

• We could depart a bit from our existing UI, pushing the boundaries of Material Design
• or Align with the direction of the design system and build out reusable components. However, Glance components could use a slightly different color palette in order to differentiate it from the authenticated experience.

I went to work taking all of the input from our group sessions to synthesize it down into four sets of wireframes. After working out the kinks, I moved into high res versions.

I took two finalized flows, built out working prototypes, then went into user research.

Purpose

• Gather feedback on usability and preference for Glance design concepts
• Comfort of data displayed

Methods

• Usability study/cognitive review
• Prototypes for 2 scenarios were reviewed by each participant

Demographics

• 6 participants
• 4 female, 2 male
• Ages 26-55
• upmarket and mainstream

Initial Discoveries
Before we got started, describing the experience to our users created immediately concern. They were apprehensive at the idea of their account information being instantly available.

Once they saw and interacted with the experience they became immediately comfortable with the data being provided, knowing that to take action on their account would require logging in.

Feedback from both flows were positive. Preference was split 50/50 between the group. So we had to make a decision in regards to our final direction.

After lengthy discussions, analyzing pros and cons of each flow, We deciding on the card approach. This would allow the dev team to create reusable components that could then be consumed in other areas of the app experience. We took our existing “illustrative icons” and expanded on their style and color palette while maintaining the aesthetic.

MVP of Glance was released to 20% of our single account, consumer card holders. Of that group, 425,970 declined or disabled Glance while 78,400 opted in.

Over the next several months it was released to all consumer card holders, then bank and eventually all account holders. Unfortunately, the future states that I designed did not move forward. Although it was originally taken on by a card product owner, it was built by a data team and then considered an enterprise feature. We were unable to find an enterprise team with the bandwidth willing to take ownership of it. Glance is still in production and in use, but does not receive any enhancements.

Looking back, what would I do different? I wish we had built in the time and effort to do a road show. Visiting the key offices, meeting with product teams and line of business designers would have given it the visibility it needed. External teams were focused on web experiences, but they could have planned for ways to utilize the feature and help it grow.

That’s my biggest takeaway. Shameless self promotion.