Project Summary
Maximus is a company with a mission focused on making banking more accessible and approachable for low income individuals by offering customers a better way to control and save their money through prepaid cards.
It’s estimated that roughly 65 million consumers don’t have a traditional bank account or prefer to use alternative financial services. Working closely with our banking platform partner, Avid the goal was to design a prepaid card experience that would give these customers the freedom, convenience and security they needed to manage their money easily.
I was tasked with helping Maximus envision and design their product experience for the launch of the company.
Challenges
Maximus was a project that had already been started prior to my working with the current team assigned to it. I was not privy to the early stages of the project, but came to learn that it had encountered some challenges that had caused it to be put on hold.
The stakeholders who had started the project did not agree with the direction it was taking, and as a result chose to pause it at that time.
Taking into consideration the project had already been initiated I began with reviewing what work had already been done with regards to research, then afterwards sat with stakeholders to discuss what went wrong with the project in the past to ensure their expectations would be aligned moving forward.
To get a better understanding of the scope of the project as well as better educate myself of the types of customers the business was aiming to target I spent some time further collecting insights using a few different methods, to drive the planning phase.These ranged from having additonal discussions with stakeholders and the development teams to stress testing other competitor platforms and sending out surveys and questionnaires to record customer pain points with current prepaid card services.
Throughout the research process, I categorized the users we identified with similar goals and pain points and created personas based on the insights we gained. From there I translated these insights into user journey maps and analyzed these in tandem with the comparative analyses I made from the other companies to ensure we would be problem solving for both the business’ objectives as well as each of these user’s needs in the features we prioritized.
Aligning Expectations & Design
Since the project didn’t meet expectations in the past and would require buy-in and coordination from external partners I also invested time into documenting and communicating the progress to stakeholders and other departments to ensure everyone was on the same page moving forward at each step. Prioritization of addressing customer pain points as they applied to the business drove the hierarchy of sections and pages in the site architecture. Once site architecture was defined I created lo-fi wireframes to test each section of the site in a fast and iterative process before moving to create the high fidelity screens.
Balancing Collaboration
For creating the product's dashboard who we initially leveraged our partner Avid to use their existing product which served as the starting point for the MVP of the product. Balancing and utilizing our existing capabilities in tandem with Avid’s product and engineering teams proved to be very useful in ensuring we could meet an aggressive timeline for launching.
We also designed our own in-house dashboard to be developed alongside the initial site.
Results
Despite the initial limitations with the project, we were able to successfully design a prepaid card experience for Maximus that was well-received by stakeholders and the initial user groups during testing. This work laid the foundation for future development of the platform as well as future collaboration with our partners.
