Overview
The State Street Corporation is one of the largest and oldest financial institutions in the United States, with a long history of creating digital tools to solve for daily tasks.
The objective of this project was twofold: to create a cohesive experience across existing digital tools and to establish guidelines for future experiences.
Challenge
How do we create a consistent user experience across 166 products while guiding future initiatives?
• Product teams operating in silos
• Each product was designed differently
• Inconsistent design patterns
• Lots of manual and ad-hoc processes
• Lack of user experience investment
Team
Creative Director
Four Designers
Information Architect
Design Developer
Researcher
Project Manager
Product Owner
Business Analyst
Worked closely with our client to ensure they were involved every step of the way
Role
Design Director | IBMix
Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing,
Workshop Facilitation, Design Systems
Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing,
Workshop Facilitation, Design Systems
• Led the design on team
• Design of five universal experiences
• Design system library and website
• Designed for an ecosystem of products
• Mentor for a new State Street UX team
• Design Thinking workshop facilitation
Discovery
Initial Research
We initiated the upfront discovery process by interviewing crucial internal stakeholders, current State Street product end-users, and clients. Our findings led us to identify My State Street as the initial flagship experience that our design system should prioritize. We then created four personas to help the team empathize with our end users.
Workshop
Following this, we organized a design thinking workshop to ensure that all business stakeholders were on the same page after developing a comprehensive understanding of our users' objectives and challenges. We collaborated on vision statements to serve as guiding principles and mapped out a future state scenario. These results gave our team a blueprint of what we aimed to achieve with our My State Street MVP.
Vision Statements
Vision statements are statements of intent written
as user outcomes. These outputs from our workshop helped to guide both our team and our business stakeholders on what we wanted to accomplish.
Definition
Participatory Design
Leveraging what we learned, we developed a low-fidelity My State Street prototype to initiate our concept testing. We then engaged in participatory design sprints with key stake holders and end users in a co-located environment. After obtaining feedback we refined our prototype and continued testing.
Ecosystem
We investigated several smaller internal products that would eventually emerge as crucial flagship experiences. By understanding My State Street and these various products, we established a collection of design principles and fundamental universal experiences. These universal experiences played a vital role in revamping other flagship products and functioned as a compass for shaping our design system.
Design principles & universal experiences
To steer the design of our flagship products and the components of our design system, we created a series of design principles and identified five universal experiences. Our principles aided in harmonizing our goals and creating a cohesive visual language, while the universal experiences ensured a consistent user experience across a range of interconnected products. Click the button below to see the Universal Experiences Project.
Design
My State Street Ecosystem
We built an end-to-end prototype to demonstrate how our flagship products could function as a unified experience. Doing so aided in visualizing end-to-end workflows and conveyed the value of an ecosystem rather than distinct disjointed experiences.
Component Library
We deconstructed the experiences of our flagship products into design patterns and assembled them into a UI kit that IBM and State Street designers could employ to enhance their product experiences.
Design System Guidance
We also created a companion website to our component library that housed all pattern and component guidance, our design principles and universal experiences. This deliverable was critical in aligning the growing team of user experience designers working on various products.
Outcomes
IBMix developed a governance program that would help State Street evolve its design system to enable product teams to contribute to reusable coded components and ensure that design moving forward would be more cost efficient and great for its users.
IBMix also helped State Street view design as more user-centered than requirements-centered. As a company looking to transform, the design system was an excellent opportunity for product teams interacting with the design system to practice design thinking by focusing more on the user flows, use cases, and intended user experience for their user rather than on a list of requirements to create a product.
Lessons Learned
Identify the flagship experience as early as possible to optimize the discovery process. Building an enterprise Design System takes work. We should have had a workshop early with State Street product leaders.
Clearly define your desired outcomes for user research and testing initiatives. Once a consensus of results is agreed to, limit the number of client interviews to a reasonable level. State Street hired IBM to share our expertise, and we leveraged many best practices to work for everyone.
Adopt a discerning approach to selecting which current state products to incorporate in the early stages of the process. We could have identified this in the workshop with the right people.