App Redesign - Bank of America
Visual Designer
Overview & goals
As part of Bank of America’s rebranding effort, the mobile app was redesigned to reflect the brand’s new look and feel. The existing app at the time was very outdated visually and was way overdue for a facelift. We had three teams of designers create three different concepts to present to design and product leadership. One concept would be chosen to decide the overall style and functionality of the app. As the sole visual designer on our team, the primary goal for me was to craft a bold, modern visual experience which followed the new brand guidelines.
Challenges
One of the biggest obstacles was to not only implement a new look and feel, but to also follow a newly proposed IA structure. The other major challenge was working closely with the brand team, who had recently released new brand guidelines and were very strict in following them. We wanted to push the brand to the edge and come up with something exciting and refreshing compared to the existing experience.
Understanding & defining
Within a team of four designers, our goal was to come up with one of three new and innovative concepts, which would then be presented to design and product leadership as the north star vision of the app. The first step was working with the user researchers who had gathered feedback from customers on their views of the existing app and what they’d like to see in the future.
Based on the user research, we wanted our concept to align directly with our customers’ visions. We wanted to tell a story with our concept and needed to create a persona and customer journey map that would help dictate the flow and content. Our journey map was centered around a young professional who was saving up to buy a home. We figured out all the steps he’d potentially take to reach his goal, and how he’d use our app to help him along the way.
From there, we had lots of ideation sessions where the interaction designers proposed new IA, navigation and functionality to begin structuring the concept. A lot of collaboration was also done using online white-boarding tools (InVision Freehand) since most team members were in different cities.
Visual design
As the visual designer, I became very familiar with the new brand and also gathered outside inspiration from all over to determine a specific look and feel. I finally came up with a mood board that brought all my ideas and inspiration together, so that anyone looking at it could get a sense of the style I was going for.
After presenting it to the team, we decided on a bold and colorful style which we thought would match well with the IA and wireframes that were designed. We wanted a visual design that would push the brand to the edge and to see how far we could go with it.
I then began to iterate on many rounds of high-fidelity screens, applying the new brand’s colors, fonts, iconography, etc. while also exploring the boundaries of it. We finally landed on a style that the whole team really liked. It was very sleek and modern, and really fit well with the vision of the concept.
Outcome
All three concepts were presented to design and product leadership, and most really liked our concept the best. The visual design, in particular, was very well-received. The stakeholders liked how bold and colorful it was compared to the previous app’s style which was very plain.
Our design director was very pleased with the way we pushed the brand to the edge and explored ideas that were a bit outside acceptability. In the end, a safer concept was selected as the more viable, short-term design option and complied more with the brand guidelines. However, design leadership held our concept in high regard as the north star vision to eventually strive for in the future.