The Cocktail

The cocktail is a Spanish digital agency with offices in Madrid, Bogotá, and Mexico City. We worked with very well-known clients in different sectors such as media, retailing, and banking.

Banco AV Villas - Context

AV Villas is one of Grupo AVAL's banks, one of Colombia's most important holding companies.

I collaborated as UX Consultant for the Digital Consultancy agency The Cocktail. This project was carried out alongside digital strategists, managers, information architects, researchers, designers, and developers.

The challenges

Increase the acknowledgment of products of the bank's portfolio in their customers.
Increase the number of acquisitions of products through their digital portal.
Change the perception in the customers of being a bank exclusively for depositing and saving the salary
Develop a structure that can escalate efficiently in the future

Research

Firstly, we interviewed stakeholders and some managers of the bank's sections to determine the value proposition, their relationship with the customers, some key partners, and their expectations with the new portal. We also talked with some customers to define the customer segment and understand their needs and expectations in the new portal.

Some findings

After interviews with the stakeholders and talking with some customers through some channels, we could identify the following:

Customers have a picture of AV Villas as a bank where their salaries were deposited.
The customer service, especially in the offices, has an excellent reputation and acceptance, making customers prefer to go to an office and talk with an agent in person.
The language in the old portal was very technical, and the understanding of the products and services offered by the bank was shallow. In addition, documentation of the products and services provided by the bank was extended and tedious.
Acquiring a product in the old portal took many steps, and customers had to complete it through several channels (phone, email, in-person). In the end, users abandoned the process very quickly.
The organizational structure was quite complex, making some stakeholders have a partial vision of how the company works.

The proposal

After having a clear map of the stakeholders' vision and a better understanding of the bank customers' habits and pain point points, we started establishing a structure that lets customers find the bank's products easier.

We started doing sketches and wireframes to validate the options and functionalities we proposed to stakeholders. Using the wireframes, we worked alongside stakeholders to decide on the most crucial sections that will explain our proposal.

In the prototyping phase, we did design explorations and followed good practices of usability and accessibility; we set up the guidelines (Layouts, typographies, colors, icons, illustrations, tone of voice) of the new design. Besides representing the company values, the new design helped sell the company's products effortlessly.

When prototypes were ready to test, we recruited some customers and asked questions about their perception of the new portal, the clarity of the information, and the tone of voice. We took advantage of their participation to test some simple tasks that showed us how they achieved them. Stakeholders could hear what participants did and saw in a separate room for these sessions.

These tests were a very open-eyed exercise where they could see some unexpected reactions, giving them a better idea about their customers. After seeing the results of the tests and collecting more feedback, we refined the proposal and delivered it to developers for the implementation part.

Below is a short video of the prototype used in the tests.

Other projects

In some company projects as a UX Consultant, I was responsible for ensuring that our projects met the usability and accessibility standards. To get that, I did some Usability Expert Evaluations such as Heuristics.