Barclays CloudIt

Step into Barclays CloudIt – where seamless connectivity meets secure banking. Redefining accessibility, flexibility, and innovation, CloudIt offers streamlined processes, heightened security, and personalized solutions tailored to your financial needs. Welcome to a new era of banking convenience that prioritizes your experience.

My role

Senior lead UX/UI

Year

Oct 2013

Deadline

18 Months

My tools

My deliverables

Facilitate workshops
Navigation across channels
Create mobile and desktop wireframes
Create interactive prototypes
Write CSS/HTML/JS code

Project requirement

Barclays envisioned enhancing customer experience by offering a secure repository for essential documents, receipts, and bank communications. This initiative aimed to streamline interactions, providing a digital vault for documents associated with processes like account openings and mortgage applications. The goal was to empower customers with a reliable and organized digital storage solution, reinforcing Barclays’ commitment to security and convenience in financial services.

Discovery phase

Stakeholder engagement

We conducted numerious workshops with the business, in order to gain an understanding of the needs and requirements for the project. We ensured that we conducted individual sessions as well as group sessions to ensure all those involved could speak freely and impart as much knowledge and information as possible.

User engagement

We were able to look at the Bank’s online logs as well as the new account signup facility to ensure that we were able to get a good cross section of users to engage with. We were able to define the demographics the new service would be aimed at, as well as the type of documents that they would like to upload. We were also able to unearth some painpoints that the current users had with the desktop and mobile services.

All the information then was analysed and we were able to extract the info to ensure we had a thorough understanding of the business and users requirements.

Competitive analysis

We conducted research as to what services were available online for users to manage documents, share the same documents and then be able to allow others access to those same documents. How the services worked, the cost plans as well as the functionality offered by the market.

We also conducted numerious user research interviews, to gather information on;

what type of documents they reuse with 3rd parties
how often & who they send them to
how they keep track of the versions and who they have shared them with
have they ever lost documents
would they use a cloud service
would they use a service provided by their bank
their feelings with relation to security of their information and documents
their thoughts about the bank in general

We were able to then put the information onto our wall so that we were all reminded of what we were trying to acheive, for whom and the obsticles we needed to overcome.

User flow

The user flow needed to fit in with the existing Barclays Mobile Banking application(BMB), where branding plays a large part of the UI. We discussed the various way in which a user could navigate through to the CloudIt service once they have logged into the BMB. As a UX team we brought in various proposals for the integration of the service and 2 propposals were forwarded for user testing, where I was involved in 1 of the proposals and created the prototype for testing.

Application flow

The testing proved that for mobile and tablet the navigation would vary slighly, this was due to the fact that the BMB application was only available for the mobile platform, for the tablet platforms, we were to engineer a new app, navigation and flow.

We wanted to allow the user, the ability to access the core data from their document stream. May that be via the stream itself, or conducting tag searches, docuemt searches, as well as payments & receipt date searching.

To acheive this, for the first time user, we creatd a feature carousel that a user could engage with and learn how to use the service. For regular use, this carousel would be removed, but if the user needed to view it again, it would be available in the user settings screen.

etails view. We would work in weekly sprints, to ensure that we all were working towards the same idealogy.

I worked on the main site navigation, to allow the user more visibility to the new features, as well as adding promotional banners on the homepage. My task for this phase was to create a concept that would allow the user to see all the documents ingested by the system and relay them in an ordered fashion. I decided on a timeline concept, where the top most item was the most recent item, and the lower the user scrolled, the further they went into the past.

Wireframes

The iPhone wireframes were a little more tricky to complete, I had to ensure that the user could still have a feature rich application, allowing them to carry out all the tasks and features that were available on the desktop and iPad. I created the document stream and the interaction between the stream and the document view. We conducted lots of user testing on these concepts, to ensure we were not taking anything for granted. Making use of the onboard camera makes the user Journey to upload new documents such as receipts and documents very simple and quick.

I decided to work on the iPad wireframes simultaniously, due to the short deadlines. As the Lead UX, I had to create and ensure we all followed the same wireframing patterns. I took on the task of working on the dashboard, the stream and the user interaction from the stream to the document d

User testing

We engaged an external lab to conduct our user testing, we did this due to time limitations as well as budgetary constraints. We used the lab throughout the discovery and design phases, to ensure our ideas and solutions were usable and assisted the user in working with the app successfully.

I found the testing was fantastic as we were able to gain deep insights into the subjects, their habbits and how they interacted with the prototypes. These insights, further enabled me to refine the UX as well as offer some thoughts to the team on our doirection and some functional changes we needed to make.

We were then able to discuss the feedback, and incorporate some of the feedback into the UX and prototypes. We then conducted further tests with the users to ensure we had made improvements that seemed necessary prior to the UX being signed off.

User flow

Application flow

Mobile

iPad

Desktop

Project outcome

Phase 1 Desktop & Phase 2 Mobile went live in January & March 2013, with huge success. Over 500,000 signups in the first month alone, which is a great indication of how well it has been received by Barclays customers.

There were also cost savings within Barclays, an estimated saving of 90%, to IT budgets over the next few years. Which made the stakeholders very happy.

Due to the success of the feature, Barclays decided to offer users to go paper free, with all banking communications now ingested onto the stream, saving on postage, paper and enforcing their agenda of going green.