chase business mobile
A proof of concept to better serve Chase Business customers
Phase 1: Audit + Opportunity
Phase 2: Exploration + Planning + Execution
CBM phase 1
scope: concept exploration
design team: 2 UX designers, part time
One of the initial goals was to get some of the core business products into a mobile experience. Chase Business primarily focuses on small business owners, and the primary hypothesis here was that they would benefit from being able to manage or check on their business on the go.
During this phase of the project, the primary goal was to explore the possibility and viability of an MVP without expending too much in the way of time and resources. A lot of this work paved the way for a designated Chase Business Mobile team, which I’ll speak to in phase 2.
mental models
To start, I mapped the components and potential mental models to frame future exploration. At this stage It was important to highlight the complexity of products, and the versions of the products being used by different business types and sizes.
We were not only thinking about how to translate complex web experiences that people depended on for their livelihood from web to mobile, but also how iterate upon systems already deployed to millions.
Without fail, the Chase business team met an increase in customer reach-outs with any new design: more than anything, people (especially small business owners) need to feel in control of their money.
Having done a quick pass at potential mental models, questions, and needs based on our existing products and insights, I moved on to the actual products themselves. I created flows and high-level sitemaps of the existing web experiences to highlight the technical/flow complexity.
all products IA
This was helpful not only in understanding how to translate these flows into mobile, but also in assessing our web experience. This was the first comprehensive documentation of product “hero flows” which allowed us to audit processes and see where similar flows did and didn’t align.
To further our exploration around available products, we looked at our existing/robust business user archetypes form our research team. We used this background to focus on target business personas and better understand which products would make sense to prioritize within our existing suite.
archetypes distribution
The research team had done a lot of work in defining general archetypes. I was able to take those examples and map relevant jobs to be done for a comprehensive view. The archetypes were:
Entrepreneur
Bookkeeper
Jack of All Trades
Daily Tasker
Chief
Hands on Executive
Second in Command
One of the many benefits of having a large design organization was that we were able to glean insights from business interviews from ongoing products. This allowed us to dig in deeper to points of emphasis/jobs to be done. With that information I created a new grid capturing painpoints, tasks, goals, and products based on our business archetypes.
We then used this information to create more tangible personas with the goal of creating storyboards to distribute to our business and product partners to create a use case and budget for an MVP mobile app specific to business.
Because the goal was to establish the use case and user type for an MVP mobile experience, I worked with another designer to combine some of these archetypes into more concrete personas, leveraging the information and first hand accounts we had from user research.
I crafted the following personas and storyboards to provide an example for stakeholders as to what some use cases for this app may be.
The project was pitched and temporarily given a budget. Ultimately, leadership decided to build out a full team around Chase Business Mobile. I joined the new team with one manager, two other designers, two researchers, and one product manager.
phase 2
Establishing a business paradigm in a two-track process
Scope: MVP
Timeline: Feb- July
Team: 3 UX Designers, 2 UX Researchers, 1 Design Manager
iterative track.
The CBM team work was split into two primary tracks: iterative and vision. The iterative track addressed products and features that were in the roadmap and had designated scrum teams to make web features like ACH payments and requests available on mobile.
Because I worked on the web ACH product and created the audit flows for our web products, I led the design for incorporating ACH functionality into mobile. Due to dev capacity, this experience became a hybrid web experience, which required collaboration across web and native design system teams, front end scrum teams, and QA testers.
We worked in 2 week sprints with design working a sprint ahead, and I helped to define and prioritize requirements based on the web product with a scrum team based out of Bangalore. By the end of the process we had established patterns for hybrid business web flows to be leveraged in the near term.
One of the pain points of delivering a hybrid solution for the ACH product highlighted an issue that proved essential for much of the vision track work we proposed: the current mobile app was just not structured in a way that could account for the complexity of business products and needs. From account management and tax identification numbers to managing cashflow and timing of payments, the consumer solution solved entirely different problems than what small business owners needed.
I did a quick audit of the mobile architecture highlighting the gaps for business users, the need for a new navigation structure, as well as the fact that business products have entirely different enrollment requirements and price points.
vision track.
At the same time, we continued exploring what a Chas Business Mobile MVP would look like, starting with defining the business space and diving into the following process:
Define the customer and jobs to be done
Diagram the conversation
Storymap
Prioritize features and requirements
Identify modules and components
Design and test iterations
One of the first things we did was establish what we meant when talking about the “business space.” To date, most of the emphasis within the Chase function had been on small business and middle market. That being said, in exploring how a mobile app could serve different needs we also started looking at a “hustler” archetype - users that fit into the gig economy and more freelance oriented businesses.
The general design and research plan had a heavy emphasis on identifying the user and jobs to be done— this was important in that it allowed us to get buy in with stakeholders and involve them in the design process to see the value of a Chase business mobile app. It also gave us the foundations for the very iterative and cyclical (in a good way!) process.
One of the key parts of these early stages was to take existing research and qualitative interviews across different business archetypes and conduct co-creation sessions with them. Building a concrete body of evidence in terms of need and opportunity really helped us going into the design sprint with company stakeholders.
define the customer and jobs to be done
With a basic foundation as far as user archetypes and high level needs, we kicked off a design sprint with stakeholders across the consumer and community banking segment within Chase. We followed the Google Ventures Design Sprint framework making adaptations where needed, knowing this would be a longer term initiative.
Monday - Map out the problem and pick an important place to focus: following a competitive analysis walkthrough I put together, we had stakeholders, designers, developers, and pms ideate and prioritize key user needs. We aligned on the following statement to focus on for the MVP:
How might we help a business owner understand her financial health in a snap and take action?
Tuesday - sketch competing solutions on paper: following ideation and dot voting from the day before, we split into groups and started iterating on some of the concepts that came up during crazy eight ideation previously. At this point we really started to narrow down onto two main concepts.
diagram the conversation
Wednesday - make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis: With our concepts of a time based model and an account based model, we came together to define what the core customer journey and need that we are trying to solve for. This was an elaboration of the user need defined on the first day of the sprint: How might we help a business owner understand her financial health in a snap and take action?
story-map high-level requirements
Thursday — hammer out a (not so) high-fidelity prototype: We mapped out (and sketched out) the high level requirements and key points in the journey to answer our how might we statement. Given the size of our team, we stayed in two core groups in order to create comprehensive design screens and flows to pull insights from each approach. Knowing we would have time to iterate and test with various Chase business customers, we kept the fidelity closer to wireframes for this stage.
Though we went through this process during the design sprint, subsequent iterations meant revisiting and revising the high-level requirements and associated design solutions.
prioritize requirements
Friday - test it with real live humans (or in our case, review with stakeholders): Because of the size of the company, potential budget, and team, we used this time to review and align with stakeholders again at the end of the week, knowing we had a comprehensive testing plan ahead.
identify modules and components
One of the advantages of our modified sprint was that we were able to leverage the expertise of our business partners and better understand the business need — one of which was the need to solve for people who own multiple businesses as well as freelancers. At this point, solving for multiple businesses, locations, and tax-id numbers became a priority within our design solutions. This was one of the main components we constantly iterated upon to provide a scalable solution.
design + iterate
We had been designing and iterating since the design sprint, with the added advantage of iterative testing every two weeks to get direct feedback from actual Chase Business users. This was an incredibly collaborative process that allowed us to dig deeper into specific user needs.
in the end…
There were rumblings of restructuring and re-organizing the business org at Chase around the time I moved on to my new role. However, we created a great foundation for business needs in the mobile space, and established an iterative working process that helped us continue to move forward in a vision-track process.
