iOS and Android apps

A solid design process backed by thorough research and user testing have marked the success of new feature development for the mobile app.

The Manulife Bank mobile app already had a great rating in the app store when I started and we wanted to keep the momentum going. Starting with the next major feature on the roadmap, we took the time to understand the customer problem, define the experience, and explore and test through rapid prototyping.

My personal goal was to user test every new feature. We didn’t have a recruiting pipeline, and COVID lockdowns were just beginning. This made it difficult to reach out to customers. So, we started by leveraging the organization. Manulife is a huge company, and almost every employee is also a Manulife Bank customer. We built high and low fidelity prototypes and tested them in moderated sessions with customers from the org. This enabled us to learn quickly, make changes, and keep moving forward.

We started with this approach and as Manulife capabilities improved, we were able to move from research/testing with employees to recruiting with Usertesting.com and eventually building our own customer innovation community (see ‘Customer focused’ below).

Tools: Figma, Sketch, Invision, Userzoom, UserTesting, Balsamiq.

Online banking

Online banking was at the tail end of a two-year long redesign. There were a few features left to design and code, and a launch experience to consider.

We applied the same design process from the mobile team and worked to ensure each part of the experience was considered and tested with users. Regular design reviews with designers, engineers and product owners allowed us to come up with great ideas that were feasible and ensure everyone was on the same page.

At the same time Manulife was building on a single-sign-on feature called Manulife ID. Manulife ID required lots of consideration and integration across the organization. I worked with mobile and online banking teams and designers from across the company to define the experience for our customers within the constraints of the selected technical solution.

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Sketch, Invision, UserTesting.

Customer focus

A customer focused and collaborative UX process is key to building great products and services.

My design philosophy fit well within the newly defined Manulife process, and I wanted to press a little bit harder on the early stages—research. My experience on agile product teams is that sometimes we move quickly to get something out the door and then see if it sticks. While that’s a benefit to delivering value for customers and avoids wasting time on things that don’t matter, it can also lead to MVP solutions that don’t deliver the fully intended experience. As a result, the feature falls flat and we throw it out altogether.

Research helps us fill in those gaps. It provides a better idea of what customers are looking for and removes the guess work. That enables us to confidently build fully formed experiences that we know will hit the mark. Good generative research allows us to fill the product pipeline with innovation features based on insights gleaned from our customers.

In 2021 we dug into research and worked to shift the culture and understanding of what is possible. Our goal is to build an experience playbook of prioritized opportunities based on customer insights that feed into the strategic roadmap. I worked with a researcher to define an approach, and then spent much of 2021 recruiting, running qualitative ethnographic customer conversations backed up by quantitative surveys to support our findings. We opened the interviews up to any Manulife employee to join and learn first hand from our customers.

From these insights we’ve defined eight customer archetypes, an in-depth banking experience journey with hundreds of decision points, experience principles and themes, and the start of a prioritized list of experience opportunities. Our work has provided a new lens for colleagues and leadership across the bank to view our customers and apply in their specific practice area. We’re in the ideation and prioritization stage and look forward to moving opportunities forward in the coming year.

In 2022 we are applying the same framework to Manulife Bank advisors and brokers.

Innovation community

We’ve backed up our research efforts by starting an innovation community. The community is a short list of Manulife Bank customers who have agreed to provide input and feedback on feature development at the bank. It gives us direct and quick access to our customers and expands our testing capabilities beyond Manulife employees. This is a community we want to nurture and grow and while I didn’t start the initiative, I’ve led the definition of experience principles, themes, and practices that characterize the community experience. I also coordinated and ran the first batch of studies through the community last year.