THE CHALLENGE

Digital transformation, Delivery. GoToLoans (GTL) is a fully digital end to end consumer lending product that

ThoughtWorks is building for Barclaycard (BC). The product is intended to serve the German Market and the aim is to develop a fully digital single application experience. The hope and premise was a fully digital experience that will drive customer adoption and push market share in the consumer lending space for Barclaycard in Germany.

The end to end digital proposition results in customers being able to receive funds in their account through a continuous online journey from landing on the loans product page, performing calculation through to fulfilment and money in the bank in less than 24 hours.

MY ROLE

Act as Design Lead to coach and enable the internal design team on Lean and Agile while delivering a new digital experience to release loans online. Coordinating research and testing in 3 countries. The team won an award as the best agile team of the year across the whole Bank Group. 

DURATION

7 weeks

TEAM

1PM, 1 Design Lead, 4 Designers, 1 Tech Lead, 10 Devs

10 THINGS THAT WEREN'T WORKING ON THIS PROJECT

From the beginning of the project a total of 8 designers worked at ExpressKredit in 3 different locations: Northampton, London and India. We worked

closely with the Customer Experience team in Hamburg, with the Barclaycard Branding team in London and with 8 agencies that provided content,

illustrations, videos, photos and recruitment and facility for the usability testing sessions.

We built 5 prototypes, of which 1 was tested on 600 German customers to understand people's reaction towards the Arvato solution. The success of the

test gave stakeholders the confidence to take a risk and pivot towards a more innovative product. The product has been refined to meet the user needs

thanks to 8 rounds of usability testing. A usability boot has been built in Northampton to promote a user obsessed approach in Barclaycard.

Now that the product is live, we are collecting quantitative and qualitative data thanks to web analytics and survey. A/B capabilities will be deployed soon.

1. THE TOOLS

• 7 minutes 
• Paint
• Not enough plugs
• 1 week to access printer

2. THE TEAM

• Germany, India, London, Northampton
• Collaborative tools: email and phone calls + Agile TV

3. THE SCOPE

After the client meeting we created a project plan in order to organize the next weeks. As a team we also set our expectations and our individual development areas.

4. NO TRUST BETWEEN DEVS AND DESIGNERS

In order to evaluate the current application the goCatch team provided us a test version of the app. In couples we pretended to be passenger and driver and we took snapshots of all the screens, we printed them out and we attached them on the wall in order to understand the passenger and driver interactions.

5. NO COMMUNICATION IN THE TEAM

The GTL journey started in 2015 and has seen 30+ people from TW UK and India work on the product with key SME's from Barclaycard. The challenge was to deliver a new product in a manner that had not been done before in the bank and create a pathfinder for building lean/agile products for Barclaycard.

This involved not only working with numerous stakeholders groups: marketing, branding, infrastructure group, business stakeholders but also move this entire ecosystem to a new way of working.

Through out own trials and tribulations and in a large measure managed to slowly, but surely influence and effect a minibusiness transformation in the process of delivering this product.

6.HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE CONFUSED WITH PRODUCT

goCatch organized 6 interviews with passengers and new users. As a team we set the recruitment brief, we wrote the script for the interviews and we created some interactive prototypes. We tested the booking process for the current application, the passenger ideal path and our new ideas.

7. MOBILE LAST

8. DESIGNERS OUTSOURCING EVERYTHING

UI/UX DEBT TO THE ROOF

FEEDBACK FROM USABILITY TESTING IGNORED BUT MANDATORY TO DO USABILITY TESTING