User research & user experience design

Executing the product strategy - 3 week sprint from nothing to industry first deep-linking

COMPANY

Backbase

ROLE

Senior UX Designer

EXPERTISE

UR/UX/UI

YEAR

2024

Project description

Project description

Project description

Backbase is an Engagement Banking Platform company supplying white label experiences to millions of users worldwide through partner banks.

Timeline

From explorations to final designs in 3 weeks while working with multiple projects at the same time

Background

The Engage App focuses on giving banks the ability to send campaigns to users, increasing customer lifetime value to the bank. Our product has helped clients receive up to 232% boosts in digital marketing campaigns.

A key part of in-app marketing is to send users from a touchpoint such as a banner into another part of the app. For example, linking the user to a loan calculator flow. Our app was missing this fundamental feature.

The team

I worked with: Product Manager, User Researcher, Cross Functional Engineering squad including 3 backenders, 2 front enders & a QA specialist.

Process

Process

Process

Research

Spanning over 1 year, I worked with the User Researcher and we undertook market research, competitor analysis & user interviews to get this feature onto the roadmap. See the outcome of the research in the product strategy case study here.

Design Sprint

I organized & collaborated on a design sprint over 3 days that took us from the problem space into the solution phase of the project. By getting everyone together, this sped up the process by a few weeks.

Design & Prototyping

Worked on solutions & iterated on them for the processes to get simpler for our marketers in order to prove the concept made in the design sprint.

Testing & Optimization

Unfortunately, users were unavailable for moderated sessions. We sent the design prototype to 2 of our clients to learn more, while also working with my Design Lead & other members of the team to validate that the designs were useful, useable and viable.

Implementation

At the time, our PM was leaving. I stepped in to ensure that the period between the PM leaving and a new one joining was covered. This included refinements for the team to estimate deep linking, communicating progress with other stakeholders & keeping the team focused and on task with weekly syncs until delivery.

The design

The design

The design

Deeplinking, but better

Marketers pre-plan their campaigns, sometimes months in advance. But they often faced a common challenge - if they needed to get code to route someone, they'd need to speak to a developer, costing them up to 2 weeks of time.

Using systems thinking, I was able to create a solution where the marketer could just select the deeplink from a list. This allows the marketers to get into the flow state, therefore reducing cognitive load.

Manual deeplinking if needed

Most marketers use code in order to deeplink via our competitors, meaning that we needed to offer it as a manual option too.

This is because of Jakob's Law, determining that our marketers spend most of their time on other sites - and crucially they are used to it.

Despite this, my main goal was to make sure that our users ended up changing their behaviour.

  • Select your deeplink

    Easy, simplistic selector of integrated deep links from the Retail or Business banking apps on day 1

  • Manual option if needed

    To reduce the learning curve, we also offer the code option

Success metrics

Increased sales

In order to see if our designs were a success, I defined post release goals - they were:

  • Behavioural change from manual linking with competitors to our industry first selection

  • 3 competitors upgrading versions for this version of deeplinking

  • Campaigns running successfully with deeplinking

2 premium clients signed with deeplinking being a main factor

Results

Results

Results

Behaviour change observed with increased efficiency

Increased sales

Marketers continuously spoke about how great this would be to reduce the reliance on a developer, unlike other tools in the market.

Crucially, as described above, we observed in post release data that Marketers did indeed change their behaviour and favoured our approach over that of the manual linking on other sites.

2 premium clients signed with deeplinking being a main factor

Customers upgraded specifically for deeplinking

Increased sales

We had 5 customers express interest within the first few weeks of the major version being released to upgrade. These were then managed and upgraded over the following few months.

2 premium clients signed with deeplinking being a main factor

Campaigns using our deeplinking

Increased sales

We had 3 customers upgrade in the next few months, and when they did, they quickly used the new deeplinking selector praising it's ease and intuitiveness of the feature. We saw results of a 232% increase in campaign performance for one bank.

2 premium clients signed with deeplinking being a main factor

A key part of doubling our OKR

We had an OKR to collect 4 premium clients for our product. By the end of the year, we had doubled that to 8, with our biggest client praising the simplicity and efficiency of the feature.

We ended up taking our revenue from €0.8m ARR to €4m.

High user satisfaction ratings and excitement about taking away the need for a developer from the process