Chase Mobile App

My first internship was at JPMorgan Chase & Co. working on web-affiliated products from 2012 - 2013. In 2013, I was hired on full-time and moved to San Francisco to collocate with the design team.

When Tim Parsey was brought on as head of design for Chase in 2013, one of his first initiatives was to redesign the mobile app, which was outdated. The app was seen as low-hanging fruit, and the facelift was also an attempt to synergize a wider rebranding if done successfully.

The app launched in 2014 to 26,000 five star reviews, winning multiple design awards, affording me and other designers a patent and sparking a design language seen throughout many Chase products on web and mobile today.

Chase has an amazing digital team that works very closely on human-centered principles and

Role & Team

When I moved to California, I was the only researcher in the San Francisco office at the time. As such, while I continued my web-focused projects, I was also brought into Tim Parsey’s core design team at the genesis of the mobile app redesign initiative.

Led by Piper Lemons, I worked in an agile pod of 6 designers intensely to explore and evaluate new designs. I worked closely with my mentor, Doug Pyle - a professor at the University of Washington, and my manager at Chase - to develop and execute several of the studies. I presented the data primarily to this core design group including Tim, and even more broadly on the product engineering calls as we came closer to the finish line.

Finally, after the design was complete, I also helped work with developers to ensure design specs were met and the research was being correctly translated into the engineered designs.

Design Questions

Tim gave the team a 6-month deadline, which meant that we had to move quickly from generative to evaluative research to inform the new design ethos. The team had many questions, and leveraged both conceptual, competitive, and usability focused research tactics.

  • What do users like or dislike about other primary banking apps?

  • What do users value in terms of conceptual offerings?

  • What design styles and color schemes align with user’s impressions of the bank?

  • How do various formats and color schemes impact readability of financial transactions?

  • How do users interact with out-of-box experience (OOBE) tutorials and menu systems?

1 - The Competitive Landscape

To understand where to start, we first looked into top competitors in the banking space, such as Cash App, BofA, Wells Fargo, and Citi Bank. I conducted desk research to put together a lit review of pros and cons, format variations, and design frameworks that we could study. I then co-led focus groups with my manger to review 5 primary screens from each of these apps to answer questions about what users liked or disliked about each of these applications.

2 - Concept Explorations

Coming up with a new application meant opportunities to explore various ways users could log in, preview accounts, understand new features, and a variety of other things. I brought 18 concepts into an abstracted story-board format to discuss with users use-cases and value. This helped to distill a hierarchy of needs and wants from users based on the concept principles or values the users saw in each concept. We then took some of the top ideas and prioritized them accordingly into our roadmap based on ranking and values overall.

Some of these concepts included:

  • Security-focused measures like pins or pre-selected icons

  • Speed-focused measures like quick access to account balances

  • Access-focused measures like ATM and branch maps

Simultaneously, we tried variations in language and discussed how different content resonated. One key finding that I had to uncover over many studies was that banks are more akin to well-being than to strictly finances, and with that comes a need for both professionalism and reassurance. Thus, being overly friendly or overly speedy could actually be detrimental compared to legal and descriptive content.

3 - Usability Evaluations

Taking top concepts and competitor frameworks, designers made their own redesigns of the app’s 5 primary screens. I brought three to four of these top contenders to a usability study where users used the Pop App to tap through screens to do basic banking tasks, talking about design nuances such as button placement, content, tradeoffs in transaction format and colors, etc. This helped us work fast, identify quick wins, and iterate across both iOS and Android standards.

4 - Surprise Findings

After launching, we tested several other updates prior to launch. A few of these findings have stuck with me my entire career. The first is around “contextual relevance” - which is the concept of showcasing new information in context only when it’s relevant (i.e. the user has bandwidth to ingest it). This finding came during a tutorial exploration, when users had the task to check their bank account for a specific transaction and 6/7 participants bypassed the tutorial and couldn’t remember even seeing the tutorial screenshots because they were so task-focused. The according design tradeoff was to ditch the tutorial in favor of in-situ updates when the user found the relevant sections.

The second surprise finding was around personalization. One of the concepts taken to early focus groups had a picture of people sailing on the log in page. This prompted someone to say “I think I know those hills… they’re in California” - which led to a discussion of how localized imagery could be used not only to provide scenic, uplifting feelings, but also as a protective measure to signal to the user that Chase new it was them by their location. This feature launched in a subsequent version of the application.