Case Study No. 3, Iteration
Case Study No. 3
Advocate through iteration.
OVERDRAFT FEE AVOIDANCE, HUNTINGTON NATIONAL BANK
Goal: Ensure underbanked and middle-to-low-income customers understand the complicated world of banking fees—and how to avoid penalties
Design Challenge: Simplifying complex financial operations into easy-to-understand, actionable advice; placing that advice where it provides useful context for the customer; corralling multiple data sources within the code base; complying with banking regulations
My Role: Content strategist and designer; banking systems subject matter expert
3.1. Existing state.
3.2. Initial redesign exploration.
3.3. Whiteboard iterations (purposefully low-res).
3.4. Polishing the text (aka, writing long to shorten).
Sad to say, penalties are a necessary check on financial bad actors. Banks need not be inhumane, however. Here we followed through on our goal of putting customers first, ensuring those who are struggling to make ends meet have a second chance—and a third, fourth, and further chances—to adjust before fees are imposed. Our iterative, human-centric design process incorporated several user touch points, giving us the essential feedback that our early designs were alarming. How about we ease off the red?
3.5. Final output.
Within a year of the resulting implementation (3.5), we saw a statistically significant reduction in fees assessed, though the concept of banking fees remained an area of customer dissatisfaction. Our later iterations addressed the underlying code base, to allow for clearer calculations on the page and fewer questions on the customer’s part. And, generally, we kept reworking the content for clarity.