Opportunity
Our client, a major banking and investment company, wanted to explore how they might make their online presence more welcoming and respectful of people who have low trust in institutions or might typically feel excluded from financial spaces.
Ahead of this phase of work, our design team conducted preliminary discovery interviews to understand the tension between identity, financial preferences and beliefs, and trust in large institutions to create preliminary designs for a new banking product site. We wanted to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of these designs with our participants.
Role
Lead Researcher
Team Members
1 Experience Strategists
2 UX Designers
1 Content Strategist
1 Project Manager
Methods
Concept testing
Primary Objectives
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Understand how participants think about banking and financial institutions more broadly
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Understand whether the designs our team created feel relatable, valuable, useful, and respectful
- Gather feedback to inform improvements to the designs
Deliverables
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Report outlining research findings and design and content recommendations
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Recommendations for future areas of exploration through research
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A comprehensive guide to conducting ethical and inclusive research at a financial institution
Approach
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Digest and parse research findings from the discovery interview phase.
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Conduct a cursory lit review of secondary research to better understand this specific financial space, the institution’s relationship with historically underserved populations, and other findings related to welcoming the underbanked.
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Craft a moderator’s guide with specific attention paid to moderator positionality, inclusive language, and participant-lead discussion.
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Conduct lean concept tests of our team’s design with participants representing historically underserved populations, including people who are BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, low-income, and underbanked.
- Using prior knowledge from extensive internal inclusive research work plus lessons learned from this research effort, compile a “living document” of guidance for conducting inclusive and ethical research that encompasses each phase of a qualitative research effort.
Client Impact
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Actionable feedback on adjusting and improving the initial designs and content to make them more inclusive, welcoming, clear, and respectful.
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Detailed information about the behaviors and experiences of historically underserved people that can be used to craft better, more beneficial and welcoming offerings going forward.
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Detailed guidance to shape future research efforts, including institutional policy recommendations for ensuring that studies are transparent, ethical, and inclusive without reducing people to their identities or treating individual identities as representatively monolithic.
