Project

Sempre Presente

(Aways Present)

Context

Company:

Itaú Unibanco

Employer:

BRQ

Role:

CX designer

Workplace:

CEIC (São Paulo – SP) and Remote

Overview

The Sempre Presente project is Itaú Unibanco’s credit card points program accessed via the Credcard app on mobile. Through this app, credit card customers can spend their accumulated points on purchases of products, airline tickets or miles.

High level goals

01

Map the main customer pain points reported in the Likert scale and identify new areas for improvement.

02

Create an iteration plan to improve the customer experience based on the insights gathered.

03

Increase the app’s NPS score by at least 20 points.

The team

The client (Itaú) trusted me to lead UX decisions for a team consisting of a PO, a Team Lead, a UI designer, and three developers. Although I led the project’s UX, I constantly reported my insights and decisions to the UX coordinator of this Itaú community.

Initial Challenge

When I joined the project, the Likert had several negative reviews and the NPS was at -19, indicating considerable user dissatisfaction. So we needed to figure out what factors were causing complications in the user experience.

Aproach

The starting point for the project iteration was the Likert and NPS analyses themselves. Due to the lack of more data to be analyzed, I decided to adopt the UCD (User Centered Design) method to delve deeper into users’ pain points, in which we would follow the following steps:

Discovery

Analysis of Likert comments

Some of Likert comments

Card Sorting

Using the Card Sorting method, we grouped the comments into the following categories: general, search, product, airline tickets, miles and exchange. Then we assigned a score from 1 to 5 for the severity of the issues on each post-it. This helped us visually organize the pain points extracted from the Likert comments and understand their related categories, allowing us to identify the severity of each category’s impact on the customer experience.

Then we add up the points for each category and based on it
we establish
the initial priority for improvement:

Heuristic analysis

To identify other problems that negatively impacted the user experience in the application, I applied a heuristic analysis to the three main workflows: Product, Airline Tickets, and Miles. Through this analysis, we identified several other usability problems:

When a customer had a question during the product flow, such as about airline tickets or miles, they had to interrupt the flow to seek help and lost all the progress they had already made.

Affected Heuristics:

Help and Documentation

The app’s notifications were hidden in a hard-to-reach location.

Affected Heuristics:

System visibility status

The customer cannot easily move between the main flows: products, airline tickets, and miles.

Affected Heuristics:

User control and freedom

Recognition instead of memorization”

The process of acquiring airline tickets is very long and lacks accuracy in its search for tickets.

This is due to:
– Searching for airline tickets takes a long time to return search results.
– the search is done by period instead of by time of day
– the customer cannot choose a class for each flight
– the customer has to manually fill in passenger data when the ticket is for themselves.

Affected Heuristics:

Flexibility and efficiency of use

User control and freedom

User interview

Therefore, I used semi-structured interviews, created from information obtained through card sorting and heuristic analysis, to deepen our understanding of the problems customers face when using the application.

Through the interviews, we validated the information obtained so far and discovered new insights.

The main insights founded:

1. Because the notifications were in a hard-to-reach location, customers didn't see when their card points were about to expire.
2. Customers frequently lose progress in their app journey due to:
- questions arising during the process
- sessions automatically ending
- journeys that are too long to complete
3. Customers frequently accessed the app to explore purchasing options, but without searching for a specific product.
4. Customer having difficulty switching between one flow and another, such as from products to airline tickets, and access to the product flow itself is hindered by having to first select a category to access the flow.
5. The customer needs a way to resolve their doubts without losing progress during the acquisition process.
6. Customers miss the ability to compare prices of products and services in cash and to be able to purchase them by paying part of the purchase price in cash.
7. The access of Always Present flow is not intuitive.
8. The process of acquiring airline tickets is very long and lacks accuracy in its search for tickets.

Definition

With the new information obtained through Heuristic Analysis and user interviews, we realized the need to conduct a new collaborative workshop with the stakeholders involved to reassess the severity of the problems perceived by users and the usability issues in each category:

Features

Therefore, I defined the improved features based on the difficulties faced by users and usability problems, prioritizing those that had the greatest weight in the card rating.

1. More accessible catalog notifications that alert users when their points are about to expire via the app and WhatsApp.
2. Configure the card app so that it doesn't log the user out while they are in Sempre Presente flows, but requires them to log in again if they access other app functionalities outside of Sempre Presente.
3. Automatically save user progress in flows.
4. Implement a floating button to answer questions without leaving the flows.
5. Facilitate access to product flows, airline tickets, and miles.
6. Automate the filling in of card details in shopping cart flows.
7. Create an animation to entertain the user while they search for an airline ticket.
8. Facilitate access to Sempre Presente through the card's app.
9. Allow the customer to exchange part of the purchase for cash, emphasizing the value of the product in cash.
10. Shorten the flow of air travel.
11. Allow the customer to choose the airfare class per ticket instead of per exchange.
12. Allow the customer to search for flights by approximate time instead of by period.

Iterating

Prioritization

After defining the features, we held a meeting with the Product Owner and the entire team to prioritize their implementation using the impact vs. complexity matrix method. This method establishes a cost-benefit relationship between how much each pain point solved by the feature impacts customer usability and how long it would take to implement them.

First sprint

Through the analysis performed in the planning phase, we defined seven priority features that offered the best cost-benefit ratio. The parameter used was usability impact – complexity = priority.

Impact

Complexity

Priority

Feature

1. More accessible catalog notifications that alert users when their points are about to expire via the app and WhatsApp.

2. Configure the card app so that it doesn’t log the user out while they are in Sempre Presente flows, but requires them to log in again if they access other app functionalities outside of Sempre Presente.

3. Automatically save user progress in flows.

4. Implement a floating button to answer questions without leaving the flows.

5. Facilitate access to the main flows: product, airline tickets, and miles.

6. Automate the filling in of card details in shopping cart flows.

7. Create an animation to entertain the user while they search for an airline ticket.

First delivery

The prototype

1. More accessible catalog notifications that alert users when their points are about to expire via the app and WhatsApp.

2. Configure the card app so that it doesn't log the user out while they are in Sempre Presente flows, but requires them to log in again if they access other app functionalities outside of Sempre Presente.

3. Automatically save user progress in flows.

4. Implement a floating button to answer questions without leaving the flows.

5. Facilitate access to product flows, airline tickets, and miles.

6. Automate the filling in of card details in shopping cart flows.

passagens

produtos

milhas

7. Create an animation to entertain the user while they search for an airline ticket.

Validation

To optimize time and successfully design the proposed features within the sprint, after designing each feature in low fidelity, I conducted a moderate qualitative usability test to verify if it solved the user’s pain point and thus correct the problematic points in an agile way.

As we validated the solutions, I assigned the wireframes to the team’s UI designer so he could design the high-fidelity prototype within the sprint.

Second sprint

Features that didn’t fit into the first sprint were designed for this second sprint — because they had a lower cost-benefit ratio — or were assigned to the corresponding team.