Creating New Tools to Support Inclusive Design in Financial Services
Defining objectives and exploring best practices
During my time at Ally Financial, I collaborated on several initiatives to make our UX design processes more inclusive. The bank had historically attracted customers with healthy finances who wanted to park their extra cash in no-fuss, high-interest savings accounts, but many of the new products and features being developed were intended for people who struggle with money and have different needs.
As an active member of the UX Inclusive Design Group, I collaborated with designers, researchers, and accessibility specialists to implement process improvements supporting more inclusive customer experiences. Our goal was to position inclusive design as a necessary practice, not an optional area of interest, so we looked for ways to integrate structured activities into our established routines. Rather than start from scratch, we dedicated several weeks to learning about best practices from industry leaders.
Inspiration for our own ideas came from two key sources. First was The Designer’s Critical Alphabet by Lesley-Ann Noel, PhD, which provides definitions and question prompts for key terms in critical theory. We were drawn to Noel’s work because it guides design teams through meaningful dialogue in a formal but approachable way. Noel was kind enough to meet with our group and advise on how to incorporate her cards into our project.
Our second source was the Conscious Design Canvas by Ben Evans, a template that asks teams to define both the obvious and non-obvious users they are designing for. After attending an InVision event where Evans explained how the tool challenges biases, we concluded that a similar canvas could help our teams develop empathy for marginalized users.
Designing a template for critical reflection
Next we adapted Noel’s cards and Evans’ canvas for an original workshop activity called the Inclusive Design Canvas. We concept-tested our initial prototype with a pilot project and used participant feedback to refine the design.
The Inclusive Design Canvas uses the critical alphabet to help participants identify specific types of unintended users for a given design. Then a series of discussion questions prompts participants to brainstorm unique pain points those users may experience as a result of having been marginalized during the design process. (The Inclusive Design Canvas is proprietary, so I can’t share images of it here.)
The outcome of an Inclusive Design Canvas workshop is twofold. First, design teams leave with a list of specific user pain points that need to be solved for, and second, they become more attuned to thinking about unintended users of products and services more generally.
Fostering empathy for a new target market
Each member of the Inclusive Design Group also helped lead initiatives within their respective functional teams as well. One UX research project involved creating a new enterprise persona to represent customers living on tight budgets. The process began with a collaboration among researchers from multiple departments who compiled data from various sources. For example, themes from qualitative interviews my team had conducted were validated with quantitative survey results from our partners in consumer research and innovation.
Based on these synthesized findings, we crafted a new persona that departed from our existing framework in innovative ways. First, we shifted from focusing on demographic to psychographic attributes. Whereas previous personas had been defined by their respective income brackets, this new persona was defined by the unique psychological traits resulting from a small delta between their income and expenses. This approach helped us clarify that customers with widely varying incomes nonetheless experience similar struggles when their living costs leave them with little wiggle room.
Second, we formatted the persona with a gender-neutral name and collage of diverse photos. Traditional personas typically include a name and photo representing a single social identity, but we wanted to convey how our new persona represents a population that is inclusive of various racial-ethnic, gender, and age groups. (The new persona is proprietary, so I can’t share images of it here.)
Putting new inclusive design tools to use
Incorporating the persona into various initiatives at the bank helped teams prioritize the unique needs of customers who are economically disadvantaged. For example, I helped write a set of screener questions aligned to the persona so that teams designing new budget tools could get feedback from appropriate usability testers.
The persona also played an important role in designing a new checking account feature called CoverDraft, which provides customers with up to $100 of fee-free overdraft coverage for qualified transactions. I led a series of journey mapping workshops with the persona to document paint points and moments of delight that our current customers might experience once CoverDraft went live.
I borrowed elements from the Inclusive Design Canvas to set up two journey maps. The first was for intended users, customers whose needs and preferences are aligned to the new feature. Workshop participants were ecstatic to document each touchpoint on this “happy path” and identified multiple moments of delight customers might encounter.
The second was for unintended users, customers who simply do not want or need CoverDraft despite the fact that it would be switched on by default. As we began to brainstorm customer pain points and frustrations, we realized that several serious “unhappy paths” had never been considered.
For example, it would be possible for a customer to ignore marketing emails about the new feature, never become aware about changes to their account, and then unintentionally complete debit transactions with money they don’t have and can’t afford to pay back. As one customer later commented on the webpage announcing CoverDraft, “How do I Opt Out of this service? If my account has items presented with insufficient funds, I do not want them paid.”
A major takeaway was the realization that some customers may not welcome the new feature, especially those who prefer overdraft transactions to be declined so they can avoid owing the bank money. Even though CoverDraft is meant to help people on the margins, we had to admit that it could actually create new problems for them instead. Product leaders were receptive to the feedback and agreed to prioritize functionality that will allow customers to easily turn the feature off. In the end, this project illustrates how inclusive design tools can help teams move beyond their own good intentions and critically evaluate the impact of their work on end users.