ATB has big ideas for the future of banking. Like, a lot of them. More than they know what to do with, honestly. For confidentiality reasons I can't dig too far into what they are in this case study, but I can give you the jist.
Not able to prototype, test, or validate those ideas on their own, they came to us. Together, we ran design sprints for some of their best and most prominent ideas. Over the course of a few months I flew back and forth from Vancouver to Calgary, participating in envisioning sessions, design sprints, and user-testing studies. My responsibility was to help flesh these ideas out, turn them into functional prototypes, test them with real people, and potentially validate them for future exploration.
We used envisioning sessions to come up with ideas and narrow down which to focus on. For each idea we created user stories and identified and defined which user journeys would be optimal to validate the efficacy and usefulness of a suggested product or platform.
In sprints ranging from 3 days to 3 weeks, I took the journeys we settled on and turned them into flows, then wireframes, then functional prototypes. I would then convert the prototypes to mid to high-fidelity designs, which was a questionable move for my sanity given the short time frames, but helped users to understand the prototypes during testing, and ultimately helped ATB to validate their ideas.
When working in an agency setting, it can be a rare occurrence that you get the budget or opportunity to properly run user-testing sessions with outside participants. Thankfully with this project I was able to make a few return trips to Calgary, where I helped set up and execute user-testing plans and scripts with live users. The results were largely a success and multiple ideas were pushed through to be explored further.
