1. Inception

A shopping ready product was a natural evolution of the collaboration between Barclays Partner Finance and Amazon, following a successful earlier pitch for an instalment-like product, which was the first project I've worked on since joining Barclays in 2019. Understandably, a partnership with a company of such a scale as Amazon has been very important to Barclays, so I was happy to be a part of it and for the past two years I've worked closely with BPF, eventually becoming the main point of contact between them and the Design team, establishing myself as a crucial stakeholder covering UX and design aspects of the majority of BPF projects.

Providing UX expertise for this work has brought up some interesting challenges that tested my ability to balance the B2B and B2C realms, along with stakeholder management and sometimes quite rigid internal (Barclays own) and external (finance industry) requirements, right from the start. The briefed-in version of the project was described as a “credit line type product that Amazon customers would be able to create and manage via Barclays channels”.

The company has already been exploring giving merchants and ability to service their instalment accounts via the Barclays app by that point. I've started by designing and testing the read-only and the read and write versions of that approach for the team, for both banked and SOLUS customers. So we had a good basic understanding of how our traditional BPF account would work for retailers and their and our customers.

-

2. Ideation

The main challenge now was understanding how a credit line product that we haven't fully grasped internally yet, could be clearly conveyed to the end-user, in a way that would drive adoption and conversion, not just for us and our channels but for the merchants as well.

The success of this was extremely important to the team, as it needed to not only meet Amazon's expectations, but also be scalable enough to fit other retailers going forward.

My feeling was that Amazon was the best retailer to try this with, UX-wise. We've had similar conversations and pitches with Apple at that point, but Amazon have challenged us to think of the most streamlined UX we could, following their well-known 1-click approach. Each journey had to be designed with the most optimal amount of steps in mind - a push that differentiated BPF from other parts of the business, where success would be determined by "happy" stakeholders and positive user feedback.

Working in such rigid UX constraints while occasionally collaborating directly with the Amazon UX team has had a great positive impact on my design thinking - it required bringing the teams together to find creative, diplomatic solutions to our design directions. We've established a working group of POs, BAs, Devs and Legal & Compliance representatives, with input from Marketing and Proposition teams, and UX has become a vital part of the strategy.

As a new designer at Barclays, I had no point of reference to how collaboration worked, and how closely Barclays followed the design thinking process that I am used to. It was a steep learning curve of simultaneously learning about the established processes, hierarchy of controls, the industry standards, requirements, and a marquee client of such a calibre as Amazon.

So it was time for questions - a lot of questions I needed answers to, to advocate for the end user in the best way possible.

I had the pleasure to work with a very collaborative product owner, who I shared the similar mindset of "getting to the point" with. Together we started our ideation process by drafting a high-level end-to-end journey that would take a customer through the process - from selecting the product, via applying for the credit line and purchasing, to servicing it within the app, which was the channel chosen for the MVP.

There were quite a few challenges here.

To familiarise myself with the App's UI and as an excuse to get to know other designers, I have started by chasing other design teams and POs for input on the drafts. Since the experience included multiple areas - homepage, payments, help etc - I have managed to get the collaboration going with multiple teams simultaneously, while making the project visible as much as possible (there were confidentially restrictions at that point).

This was the time of constant pivots in strategy, as we worked responsibly to Amazon's feedback, while exploring our own legal and development limitations. My role was to make all of this make sense to the end-user at all times - whether it's an Amazon or a Barclays one. This required flexibility and an open mind from me and the team, but has eventually also made exploration of ideas much more broad and cooperative. This was also the time when we moved from Sketch to Adobe XD, so I had to make sure my technical skills were not far behind my leadership ones.

-

3. Creation

While at the checkout work-stream was still in discussions with Amazon, I started drafting the MVP servicing experience within the App which aimed to display information about the shopping ready product in a read-only format. It was important to make sure we surfaced everything a customer would want to see in a clear and easy to find way, using a digestible copy. While we had a semi-clear idea of how the product would work, and the hierarchy of plans (purchases) in each account, we still had major challenges around concepts like credit limit and monthly payment limit.

This was the point I started pushing for a closer collaboration with copywriters, as I discovered that historically they worked separately, supplying a Word document with a proposed copy. I come from experience of constant collaboration with copywriters, as it's proven to be an important part of UX - their active involvement in actual design work and testing is crucial.

As I have learnt, good design + bad copy = bad UX.

So after an internal agreement and Legal's blessing, we've come up with an interactive visual representation of the credit limit that we'd put into testing.

This was the heart of the feature. The challenge was to create an element that clearly communicates the essence and current status of the product, while following familiar patterns of the App's UI. We had Barclaycard and Transactions teams on board, while running an internal guerilla testing, to gather a strong internal consensus around the design. Other parts of the journey had their own discussions and challenges, and required input from other teams, like homepage, help, onboarding etc.

The full scope of the journey run across almost all of the App, with a view to include the payment area next.

Dealing with challenges during this stage required a lot of patience and flexibility from me as well as the working group. Balancing between the established patterns and potential improvement was a constant challenge. Most of the time proposing a UX improvement was met with an open mind, however. Equipped with a clear rationale and my past experience I managed to get the stakeholders on board with most of the suggestions, that have made it past testing.

Naturally, some others were de-prioritised or declined - those had their own reason, mostly relating to development effort or regulations.

So this was a learning experience for all - me, testing my limits as a designer and areas of influence as a design lead, and others, learning about why UX matters and what we actually do as designers.

I was pleasantly surprised with the level of respect I have been given coming into the project, from everyone involved. I had a feeling that even though historically design has been treated as one of the steps in the waterfall process, where we'd supply the UI and move on to another project unless there are changes, there was an actual appetite to have a design leadership - someone who wouldn't just take responsibility for how things should look and feel, but also would explain why, show evidence, and make it feel logical in each stakeholders head, so they feel involved and comfortable with it all.

In other words, a design thinking process, just without a name yet.

The moment I realised that, I saw an opportunity to push for adopting the framework, without proposing any drastic changes in the way people are used to work but rather:

- anchoring the ways of working that already a line with design thinking and agile, and
- feeding in new ways of working gently, so it's never jarring to the process.

These included:
- running workshops
- getting people in the room or an email thread together
- managing expectations by prioritising design work
- making my work visible and open to feedback at all times
- emphasising user testing as a main driver for design decisions

Eventually I gave the BPF leadership an overview of the framework in a virtual talk. My main point was that working and agile, i.e. collaborating and being adaptive to changes, and adhering to the user needs, doesn't require any dramatic changes to how we work - it just makes sense if we want our products to succeed with the customers.

-

4. Testing

Set up by the researchers, 10 testing sessions of 60-minute in-depth interviews with both Barclays and non-Barclays customers, have brought some interesting insights we had to plan around as a team. Most of the struggle has been uncovered around the initial proposition, between the purchasing and the checkout stages - the new product needed a clearer explanation and presentation, to entice the end-user to choose it as their primary payment method. The reusability of the product was the main reason behind the confusion and hesitation to become locked into a finance account agreement.

The servicing (in-App) part of the journey tested really well - even SOLUS customers, not familiar with the app found are flows easy to navigate.

Our ability to test relatively early into the Iterations stage has been extremely useful - we were able to "fail fast" and recover quickly, armed with enough user feedback to rethink how we display the product on Amazon's part of the journey.

-

5. Iteration

Post testing iterations were agreed in a series of meetings we had with the researchers and the team. It took a couple of UX tweaks for me to come up with and approve, but we've passed the user testing control environment relatively smoothly, granted the concepts explanatory copy was still in works. At this point the project was mature enough for me to share it with the leadership and my peers at a design review.

This visibility of work was probably the reason I was asked to step in to manage one of our Component Libraries. It made sense considering the amount of knowledge I've gathered over the course of the project regarding the App's UI. This was an opportunity to make other designers' lives easier by enriching the library with templates of the screens I have already created for my project, while ensuring consistency in the components that the design team would use working on the App.

Just as I've shown in my presentation on the design thinking, iteration is a cyclical stage that sometimes goes beyond launch. This project is a great example of it, since we are still improving the experience after going live earlier this year, while keeping an eye on the adoption numbers and other analytics.

-

6. Collaboration

Looking back I consider myself lucky working on this project, as I have met and worked with a countless number of stakeholders, peers and colleagues throughout the business. As mentioned above, we could not proceed without input from multiple teams responsible for different parts of the App, as well as the control tribes, like Legal and Compliance. It was important for me to make sure I didn't work in isolation, so other designers have cast their eyes over this work as well. Their input has helped shape the final product a great deal.

To maintain constant calibration I used Miro when it was available. Working remotely meant getting people in the room was impossible, so my job was to get all the stakeholders on board with the new tool, explain its benefits and capabilities, and get them to actually participate in the design sprints and remote workshops that I ran.

I had to show a lot of flexibility when it came to the development teams as well. I wanted to make sure the handover of assets was as efficient as possible, which meant listening and learning what they needed, while introducing them to our ways of working e.g. exporting HTML specs from Adobe XD. This was a good opportunity to use my soft skills when it came to supporting them to ensure a smooth delivery, while learning more about their work.

-

7. Launch

Since the MVP's launch in 2022, Amazon volumes continue to build, following the move to 100% on 19th of October, with some prime real estate messaging also activated. An average of circa 4500+ applications a day in the first 3 months has exceeded expectations.

Instalments for Amazon is forecasted to deliver an enormous revenue for the bank. With the foundations now in place we have also paved the way for us to potentially extend this product to other Partners and further expand on this revenue opportunity. By launching this product in the Barclays App we will also have the ability to grow the number of customers using the product whilst helping them to maintain FTE costs.

-

8. Reflections

The amount of work we currently have in shopping ready really speaks for itself - since the success of the MVP launch, I am now leading designs on multiple new phases of the product simultaneously.

Overall this project has been a pivotal moment not only in my time in Barclays but in my career as a Designer. I had to learn fast, adapt and take ownership and responsibilities of a Design Lead throughout.

I believe I have managed to establish myself very well as the source of UX and as a Design Lead, while changing the way to work and collaborate with BPF and Barclays in general, for the better.

I feel confident taking on even bigger challenges and delivering more successful products going forward.