The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (or Commbank) is an Australian largest multinational bank with businesses across New Zealand, Fiji, Asia, USA and the United Kingdom. It provides a variety of financial services including retail, business and broking services.

Commbank was expanding into international banking share trading with a new product, named Agora as a stand alone entity with its own look and feel. It has been focused on the share trading between International Financial Institutions.

My Role

I was in charge of User Experience, User Interface Design and Front End Developement of the application, working as a part of the team based in Sydney, Perth and Mumbai.

My efforts were concentrated on identifying current international market offerings, Commonwelth bank business objectives, conduting user research, creating personas, clarifying their goals and needs. I was also working on designing the new branding and optimising customer journey within the application.

I generated a number of wireframes and html prototypes to present the new UI/UX. They were signed off and we progressed into development. I've completed front end development for all key sections and passed them on to the back end developers in India.

The Challenge

When I joined the team, they already had a basic working prototype of the application and a temporary branding. It was quickly put together by a crafty developer. A simple html version with a placeholder logo, a "dummy" version of the software which could be quickly tested and aligned with initial requirements.

The good news is the application passed the first test by Commonwealth Bank staff and feedback was recorded so I had a great head start. The challenge was it was put together very quickly and it was lacking proper user research and understanding of their needs and problems. The UI was also looking "busy" with too much information displayed at once. To prevent congitive overloading we needed to prioritise and simplifie the content. Most important content should have been selected and presented at the top level. Information Archetecture was always a great topic in our conference calls.

Another little challenge was our team locations. The team was spread between Australia and India. It meant not just a locational difference but we also had a language difference. That's why being on the phone, regarding any new feature or directional decision was vital. We focused on keeping everybody up to date with any new developements and making sure we have the same understanding of the requirements involved.

The Solution

A major research and analysis have been completed. We agreed to combine top level information into dashboards, displaying relevant data based on the type of user. Each card on the dashboards would then give an ability to drill down for more information. Live data visualisations would make be a big part of it. As you can probably appreaciate working with live data is not the same as working with archieved data. It has certain challenges which jad to be also identified and addressed. We wanted to make sure that our API's can handle our functional requirements and our hardware can do it fast enough for any user around the globe.

The Vision

The vision was to create the most comprehensive and easy to use International Share Trading Portal, utilising the latest technologies which would simplify every day tasks for our end-user.

* To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own view of the above project. Please feel free to contact me for more information.