Enhancing the low income experience for retail bank customers
A retail bank was losing entry-level customers to simpler competitors. I reviewed what the live product was actually doing to them, and designed the fixes that could ship first.
- role
- Product design — review, ideation, prototypes
- team
- Product, research, BA, tech, design
- phase
- Discovery
- status
- Delivered, in implementation
the challenge
Entry-level customers opened an account and then kept their primary relationship elsewhere, usually with a competitor whose whole pitch was that it was easier to understand. The brief was not a redesign — it was to find out why, and come back with something the business could act on.
Three questions framed the work: what is driving churn in the entry segment, whether customers group more usefully by what they do with money than by how much they have, and what the offer for those groups should be.
My part in it
UX and heuristic review
The live app and website across 20+ flows, plus the UI patterns underneath them.
Benchmarking
Against global best practice, including communication, accessibility and inclusivity.
Ideation and prioritisation
Workshops with the cross-functional team, then ranking what came out of them.
Prototypes
Designing the quick wins — high confidence, low build cost, shippable early.
Researchers ran the customer research and built the service blueprint, and business analysts mapped the omni-channel target state, while I reviewed the live product, benchmarked it and designed the quick wins.
what the research showed
One customer who is also a household, a business and a community
Field visits, a survey and support-ticket analysis kept returning the same shape. The customer was never managing only their own money — income arrived from a wage, a grant and an unregistered side hustle at once, and went out to dependants, savings groups and shared bills.
Segmenting by what people do with money rather than how much they earn explained behaviour that income brackets could not. That reframe is what made a single flexible account a credible answer.
what the live product was doing
The product was telling these customers, at every step, that it was not built for them
An end-to-end review of the app and website, looking for where the strategy and the product disagreed.
Across every income bracket in the guided flow, not one selection led to the no-fee entry account. The most accessible product in the range was invisible to the people who needed it most
Getting an account
- 01
The free account never appeared
The lowest income was steered to a paid account.
- 02
Apply before any price
No fee, and no link to pricing, anywhere in the flow.
Using the app
- 01
Pay opened a catalogue
Payment types, not the payments people actually make.
- 02
The amount was the quietest thing on screen
Buried in low-emphasis type under legal copy.
- 03
Components contradicted each other
Active fields looked disabled; contrast below standard.
- 04
Navigation mirrored the org chart
Duplicated menus, two names for one page.
Finding out what it costs
- 01
No upfront answer
Fees lived in a desktop PDF, with no calculator.
- 02
A misleading headline fee
Real cost ran far higher once transaction charges stacked.
- 03
Conditions buried
Rewards promoted, requirements in footnotes.
recommendation and quick wins
One simple choice beats many complex ones
The review pointed to one structural fix: a single base account open to everyone, with feature packs added as life changes. One fee structure, priced the same in every channel.
That went forward as a recommendation. The design work went into what could ship before it.
Quick wins, designed to ship first
Fixes where the problem was disclosure, sequence or hierarchy, not the product itself.
outcome and learnings
Discovery closed with one account proposal, a fee structure, a prioritised backlog and prototypes that could move ahead of the wider programme — rather than a hundred unranked findings.
Pricing is interface
Most of what customers experienced as a trust problem was a disclosure problem. Where a number appears matters as much as what it is.
Choice is a cost
Four products aimed at one customer did not read as flexibility. They read as a decision the customer was not equipped to make.
Audit before you propose
Nothing moved stakeholders faster than showing that their own acquisition flow never surfaced the free account.
next case study