Bank of America Mobile Experience (Product Design)

Overview

Bank of America’s iOS app has near 5 stars in the app store. The purpose of this project was to audit and identify areas of improvement for Bank of America’s mobile user experience.

Real user reviews were used to identify such areas, and come up with data-driven design solutions. Fromnavigation to AI-powered assitance, the redesign addresses the disconnect between user satisfactionand design in the current mobile app design.

Research

Problem Definition

At first glance, the app is a near 5-star success in the Apple App Store. However, further inspection into the app store revealed ample discontent with the current app's design and the company's service.

Complaints revealed several areas for improvement, which I was able to use a foundation for redesigning the mobile user experience.

Research Process

Gather Data & Affinity Mapping

The research process began by first identifying common complaints about the mobile experience. Five areas of improvement were identified:

Navigation (information architecture)

Customer Support

Notifications

Transaction management

Erica's Usefulness (AI assistant)

Using chatGPT to backup findings

While the research was 100% human-led, I used chatGPT to help me verify and validate my findings. This consisted of using chatGPT's 4o model for image-to-text recognition, prompting for a summary of each review and and action items to improve the design.

Product Design Requirement

By aggregating the themes and summaries, three key requirements were created:

Improve navigation throughout the app, rethinking information architecture around the areas of improvement identified in the previous step of research.

Redesign how notifications are implemented, focusing on relevancy and clear communication

Leverage Bank of America's AI assistant to improve customer support

Design

Navigation

Key Improvements

Customer support visibility

Header relevancy and information density

Clear section and visual hierarchy

Clear calls to action (CTA's)

Notifications

Key Improvements

Clear visual hierarchy

Clear functionality and legibility of nested sections

Improved communication for account, settings, and custom reminders

Erica & Customer Support

Key Improvements

Improved visual hierarchy

Improved usability of Erica, focusing on customer support and troubleshooting

Transaction Management

Key Improvements

Improved information architecture, focusing on information density and nested functionality

Simplified on-brand experience

Conclusion, Reflection, and Next Steps

This project was both challenging and fun. Given more time, a budget, and access to stakeholders, I would have included even more extensive research, including assessing and incorporating business goals in my design.

The next step would consist of gathering stakeholder feedback, including business goals to assess the redesign's proposed information architecture in place. This would look like adding/subtracting sections in the design to include product offerings in a way that further serves Bank of America's current user base.

Next, usability testing would be a key step to an shipping update. This would look like defining 3-5 user stories, depending on said stakeholder feedback, designing and prototyping the corresponding screens, and conducting a usability test with real Bank of America users.

Lastly, the new design would be wrapped up by conducting an audit of new UI components, documenting color schemes, and create design tokens to build a foundation for a scalable design system.