Designing for Mobility 2014

Building an app is easy, right? 16 year-olds build million dollar apps in their garages every other day. But things get a little trickier when the app you’re building is for a bank.

Designing and coding an app with lots of cool new features is the easy part. Creating a whole new customer channel, that is effectively the bank’s most highly visited branch, comes with a whole different set of challenges including:

• Shifting the businesses mindset from a one-off project to treating mobile as a first-class channel that needs to be supported and evolved on an ongoing basis.
• Provide all the features that customer’s expect from web banking and deliver those in a lean fashion, with a mobile first approach.
• Balancing security and fraud constraints whilst still making the app easy to use for customers.
• Pushing the boundaries of traditional brand guidelines that didn’t translate to native mobile environments.

With a conservative financial institution that’s just beginning to understand how mobile is going to revolutionise its business, you have quite a mountain to climb before your designs can see the light of the app store.

This is the journey that Toby Pritchard (Suncorp) and Ben Melbourne (ThoughtWorks) have recently been through. In this case study presentation they’ll share the highs and lows they went through while rebuilding and launching the new Suncorp Mobile Bank App.