Upscaling UX Research at Scotiabank

As a UX Researcher at Scotiabank, I designed research tools to improve UX principles both within and beyond the Design team, including a user recruitment platform that was replicated regionally.

Company: Scotiabank
Domain: Banking
My role: UX Researcher, Service Designer
Skills: Research ops, generative research, stakeholder management, product strategy
Timeline:  2021 - 2022

Abstract

One of the pillars around my work is collaboration. I thoroughly enjoy collaborating with people across teams, and countries building great things. During my time at Scotiabank, besides conducting generative and evaluative research studies, I had an active role in upscaling and democratizing research within the entire Digital Banking Team leading the design and implementation of several tools.

My Contributions

  1. Creando Contigo (Building together): A recruitment platform for research activities

  2. ScotiaPersonas: An intersectional behavioral approach to digital banking clients

  3. Research repository: Organizing and centralizing knowledge at Scotiabank

  4. UXR Toolkit: A toolkit to empower designers and leverage UXR methods and best practices

Creando Contigo

When conducting research, getting the right participants is critical. Long recruitment times and high cancellation rates were threatening the cadence and quality of research activities at Scotiabank. Seeking to tackle this challenge, I created Creando Contigo, an organic user community that serves as a recruitment platform for research activities. Up to date, Creando Contigo has supported the recruitment of over 85 research projects at Peru’s Scotiabank Digital Factory and inspired the creation of recruitment communities across Scotiabank offices in Latin America.

My contributions

As the project lead of this initiative, I was responsible for the end to end process of Creando Contigo:

  • Ideated the concept and conducted a competitive analysis

  • Designed the information architecture

  • Collaborated with a UX Designer and UX Writer to design the user interface and content

  • Managed stakeholders in design, legal, privacy, engineering, and marketing teams

  • Developed a campaign and launched the site!

Context

Due to organizational restructuring, the research team experienced a significant decrease in budget, which prevented the hiring of recruitment companies.

Obtaining participants for research became difficult, resulting in fewer research activities being conducted. We increasingly relied on "friends and family" candidates, which ultimately biased our research as everyone was using the same pool of participants. Additionally, the recruitment process took over three weeks, and the procedure for soliciting users was not centralized or communicated to all UX Designers on the team. Our recruitment efforts were slow and inefficient.

Objective

Since it was the first time something like this was being created, I had to understand the launch process for new features and the tools used by Product Managers. Following their steps, I scheduled meetings and conversations with leaders of several teams, including:

  • Write a terms and conditions document and learn the guidelines for the information management of users’ data.

  • Possibilities and technical constraints to integrate Creando Contigo in the Scotiabank app.

  • Develop a brand identity that aligned well to Scotiabank.

    Create forms in the website to collect user data and design a marketing strategy to share Creando Contigo through Scotiabank’s social media channels and track its reach.

After getting the approval of the Design Director, I was responsible for navigating through additional stakeholders to make my idea a reality. To understand the potential limitations of my proposal, I designed the information architecture and created some initial wireframes, which I shared with a UX Designer to integrate Scotiabank’s design system.

I then proceeded to design a high-fidelity version of the website with the UX Designer, and with the support of the Marketing team, we created a form to gather user data. Access to this information was limited to specific users in the research team to comply with the terms, conditions, and privacy of our users’ data.

In addition, I created an internal process and training for the Design team and anyone in the Digital Banking ecosystem who wanted to use our recruitment tool. This included filling out a form describing the purpose of their research, expected dates, and the characteristics of their users. 

Finally, I was responsible for negotiating the best incentives for our users and had meetings with several companies offering gift cards that could be valuable for them.

Design a recruitment strategy to optimize our recruitment efforts, reduce recruitment time and cancellations, improve our candidate diversity, and continue to conduct quality research.  

Action

I began my research on user communities by conducting desk research and performing a competitive analysis on various companies like Google Play, Microsoft Teams, Evernote, and local competitors. This gave me a better understanding of how these companies managed their research communities and approached their users. I observed that they focused on intrinsic motivation, where users who loved the product were encouraged to share their ideas for improvement.

Impact

After successfully navigating stakeholders and dealing with constraints, we were able to launch Creando Contigo in May of 2022. Creando Contigo is still used as a primary source for participant recruitment at Scotiabank. Up to date, Over 1K users signed up organically, impacting 87 research projects across Digital Banking since its launch in 2022.

What we’ve seen so far:

  • The biggest pain point was waiting approximately 3 weeks to set up a proposal, contact the recruitment agency, and wait for the information. Now, researchers and designers have gained more autonomy in the process, and they can recruit participants for same-week activities. Moreover, cancellation rates from friends and family participants fell significantly, given the intrinsic motivation of participants joining the community.

  • Strategically decentralized our participants and research activities from Lima (capital city in Peru) to six new cities in Peru: Cusco, Arequipa, Chiclayo, Trujillo, Piura and Ica.

  • Creando Contigo served the initiation and encouragement of research activities across different Product, Marketing, Business Intelligence teams, fulfilling the mission of upscaling research beyond the design team. Since its foundation in May 2022, Creando Contigo has sourced the recruitment of participants for 87 different research projects.

  • As part of the Creando Contigo community, we developed a monthly newsletter, where we were able to get closer to our client and be accountable with them. Through the research newsletter, we share how the voices and key findings from the participation of users in our research are shaping our design decisions at Scotiabank.

  • Creando Contigo inspired the foundation of Colombia and Mexico’s own research communities given the similar challenges their teams were experiencing.

Learnings & reflections

This is a project I feel very proud of because I was able to focus on internal users and support my team internally. I had a vision and was able to make it a reality, supporting the research practices of Scotiabank and facilitating the processes of my busy UX Designer peers.

Although hard from time to time given the several constraints each team communicated, I was able to manage several stakeholders, meet new people, and learn so much about the different things they do, as well as getting a better understanding of the process when wanting to launch something new.

ScotiaPersonas

Scotiabank Peru, a banking platform with over 2.5M users, faces challenges in catering to the diverse needs of its heterogeneous user base. Previously, user segmentation was solely income-based. However, through research, the team uncovered behaviors, motivations, and experiences that determined users' financial maturity irrespective of account balances. This led to the creation of ScotiaPersonas, a potent design tool that enables Scotiabank Peru to better serve its customers.

Context

As Scotiabank Peru evolves into the world of digital banking, we struggle to understand who our new customers are and how to offer a strong value proposition according to their financial and personal needs.

Objective

How might we develop a more human-centric way to understand our users' needs and behaviors, beyond their income level?