Taking on UX Design at Asia’s largest bank
9 months with 90+ people designing for the future of banking
When COVID-19 hit, businesses closed, people stayed home and job opportunities disappeared as the world hunkered down to brave the fallout. In the midst of this, the three of us — Petrina, Mancini and Jing Yuan — were given the chance to take up various traineeship positions in the User Experience Design (UXD) team at the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS).
As one of Asia’s leading financial institution, DBS bank differentiates itself with its brand promise “Live more, bank less”. A huge part of delivering that brand promise is to ride the digital innovation wave — leveraging advanced technology to reimagine the banking experience.
Having spent the last 9 months designing for one of the best digital banks in the world and getting a first real taste of what working in UX is like, we thought to share our experiences and learnings for those who are intending on or new to working in UX design.
Transitioning into the UX industry
Working in the UX industry may not have been an obvious choice for us, but we have since taken the plunge to go into user experience, from Jing Yuan whose career explorations brought her here; Mancini, who came from a different industry; and Petrina, who studied humans but not design in school.
What made you decide to transition into the UX industry?
Jing Yuan: My first job right out of university as a Customer Experience specialist at Airbnb gave me the opportunity to understand users’ problems directly and inspired a deep interest in tech products. Seeing how a tiny app on our phone can impact people’s lives and livelihoods was unforgettable. While exploring more about product management, I came across a role that caught my eye — User Research, and that led to me to this traineeship here in DBS.
Mancini: While I was in Ogilvy servicing OCBC Bank, I had the incredible opportunity to work on the product development of telehealth medical app. Working closely with the product team to nail down the positioning and branding, I got to sit in on the usability tests and work with their Sketch design files. It was a fascinating and thoroughly fulfilling experience for me, and it stirred in me a deep curiosity for interface design, and more broadly, experience design.
Petrina: I first encountered the world of UX design while on a year-long entrepreneurship programme in university. I had to pitch my own start-up ideas and build a simple prototype to illustrate how the app would work. After spending some time reading up and getting my hands dirty, I managed to put together a few wireframes and make a prototype. The feeling of creating something from nothing was exciting!
Working in UX design
When people think about UX, their first thought goes to design — having the creative eye to make things look beautiful. However, the work of user experience goes far beyond making things aesthetic, and definitely requires more than just creating buttons, icons and wireframes. The three of us were able to work across three UX functionalities within the Design team here at DBS — User research, Product design, and Content design.
What design projects did you work on during your time here?
Mancini: Being a content designer, I had the opportunity to explore multiple UX writing opportunities, from helping to update design guidelines, documenting localisation workflows, to error message governance. Beyond that, I got to dabble in interface design, creating a brand portal landing page, mini-product design projects with our design lead Abhinav, to writing research briefs and shadowing one of our lead UX researcher, Yan Ling, in actual UX research interviews and workshops.
Jing Yuan: During my time here, I worked with my research teammates to build an MVP (minimum viable product) of a feedback program to incorporate learnings and reflections after each research project concludes. I also worked on a project to drive sustainability in consumer banking. From understanding the context of the project, the research goals, what is needed to answer the research question, I got my hands dirty with drafting discussion guide, moderating user sessions, transcribing session notes, interpreting data and presenting findings to stakeholders.
Petrina: I was fortunate to be assigned to a project for a completely new product feature, InvoiceNow. As a product designer, I was involved in the user research, designing of the product functionalities and user testing. I also supported the design update of the DBS IDEAL business banking platform accounts and approvals, a huge revamp project that involved redesigning key user flows such as making payment, checking account balance and approving transactions.
What have you learned from working on these projects?
Mancini: Beyond researching, writing and designing, a HUGE part of being a UX designer is working with stakeholders, such as your business/product teams, project managers and developers. That also means you’re going to need to brush up on your interpersonal skills. There’ll be times when a project manager gets a little bit too antsy, or a developer gets a little grumpy, but it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, we’re all working together to deliver great products and great experiences!
Jing Yuan: From working on a research project end-to-end, collecting data, interpreting them and presenting the findings, one takeaway I have is that managing stakeholders could be more difficult than I had imagined. Since there are multiple stakeholders involved in the project, they have different perspectives and hence, different takeaways from the research presented. As researchers, the challenge comes with trying to be as objective as possible in order to support business stakeholders in making a product decision or strategy.
Petrina: As product designers, we seek to design the best user experience for the people using our product. However, working in the real world means having to work with constraints and limitations, be it constraints with budgeting, timeline, or even manpower. Working in UX, I’ve learnt, is not just about making the best designs, but being able to adapt around considerations and limitations to deliver the best possible experience for users.
What was it like working in a design team?
Petrina: It was amazing seeing how a team of product designers in a company that has multiple products and technical requirements come together to produce designs that are consistent in appearance and functional together. I remember my first design review, after having sat in many previous design reviews in my team, I was nervous and slightly worried to have to share my designs with 17 other designers. Ultimately, I came out of the review with a deeper appreciation for the need to review designs as a team. While I was just one person designing this particular user flow, this flow will eventually work together with other flows to provide one coherent user experience.
Coming into this role without the necessary finance and business knowledge, my IBG Transactions team (we work mainly with the IDEAL business banking platform), Carol and Denys were always really understanding and patient in explaining the finance concepts that I have never heard of prior to my time here.
Mancini: The online courses in Interaction Design I took only taught me a fraction of what UX actually means, and how it actually functions in an organisation as large as DBS. It’s a huge leap from learning about design thinking and drawing up a couple of wireframes to seeing how a living, breathing design system evolves and cascades down to the plethora of products under the DBS brand.
I remember getting so overwhelmed looking at the sheer number of Figma files and screens in our design library but it helped a lot that the senior designers and writers that I worked with were constantly incredibly patient, understanding and accommodating.
The learning curve (especially for the first few months) was crazy steep, but my coworkers from the content design team, Liva and Vana, were so nice about everything, and despite me being lost in most meetings, they were always ready to check in and make sure I could get back on track.
Jing Yuan: Working in user research in DBS was eye opening. Although I have read up on my own, there were still many things which I have not heard or read of, things like contextual inquiry and usability expert reviews, just to name a few. Navigating new tools was one of the challenges I faced. Even though I have heard about Figma, honestly the only time I‘ve used it in the past was to view the designs done by the designers, it was a completely new experience learning how to use them.
Learnings and takeaways
Over the last 9 months working in the UX Design team in DBS, on different projects and in different functionalities, we reflect on some of the things we have learnt and which we’ll take with us as we continue along our journeys in UX.
What are your takeaways from working in UX?
Mancini: I think my biggest takeaway from working in-house in the UXD team (particularly versus working in an agency doing ads for a client), is that many times problems aren’t always immediately evident. A huge part of designing great experiences and being a great design team involves less reactive work, and more proactive ones. We need to constantly challenge ourselves, to review what we’ve done and what we’re doing, to understand what we can do better.
Quantifying and measuring the results of the work we do is also CRUCIAL. As a design function sitting within a large corporate bank, it’s important to properly establish quantifiable objectives, so you can better measure the effects of your UX writing and design, to better visualise and prove that your work leads to tangible results.
Petrina: Design is but one aspect of building a product. As the UX team, we have to work closely with the Product team, Tech team and even the Business team, in order to truly design a product that works for the users. And with different teams comes different understandings and visions of what the product will look like, which means communication and collaboration is essential, not just within the UXD team, but across teams within the company.
In order for us to balance technical constraints, business goals and user needs mean, it is essential to spend time understanding how each team will contribute to realising this product and what success for this product means to them. Sometimes, despite efforts to find that sweet spot, there are still many hiccups along the way as we turn design into product, and that’s okay! Improvements to the product can be made in time as long as we focus on delivering products that address user needs.
Jing Yuan: One of the first few things I had to learn was to moderate a session. Through conducting the sessions, I became aware of my own biases — making assumptions about the hypothesis, having certain expectations of how participants “should be”. Special thanks to Xin Tian, one of our user research squad members, who sat in on the sessions and pointed this out to me.
Biases don’t just happen during moderation, it can happen while making sense of the data. Realising this has made me more aware of my own thoughts and challenged me to start thinking from a different perspective not only at work but even in my personal life! It forces me to be more conscious of my emotions and thoughts, and how they can work with or against me.
Any advice for the new UXer in DBS?
Jing Yuan: For anyone looking to breakthrough into UX, don’t be afraid to approach people to ask questions, if anything, this shows that you are genuinely interested and curious to learn and this is critical in an ever-changing and evolving world we live in today!
Petrina: There are many nuances when it comes to making design decisions. It might be hard to catch these nuances as a new UXer at first, but if you pay attention to how others make their design choices and focus on understanding the rationales behind them, it will soon be a piece of cake! It is all part of honing your UX design chops.
Mancini: Ask a lot of questions! Try to sit in for everything if you have the time! There’s so much to see and to learn, and if you have the time, try to be a sponge and soak up as much as you can!
Lastly, speak up! That’s definitely one thing I didn’t do quite enough of here, but if there’s anything that I can be sure of, is that there is no comment or input that is irrelevant or stupid, and every insight and opinion, no matter how junior or inexperienced, means a lot. Senior colleagues will be here to listen and to guide you, so make the most of it! You’ll have a blast.
Shoutouts to the team
Mancini: So here I am, at the end of this nine-month traineeship, and what a journey it’s been. Switching industries hasn’t been the easiest thing, and there has been so much to learn, but I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I’ve been so grateful for the opportunity here, and for the kindness, patience and teachings afforded to me by the senior colleagues around.
Jing Yuan: The past few months have been a tough and challenging journey, nevertheless it was definitely worthwhile to be able to learn from one of the most established UXD teams in Singapore! I am extremely thankful and grateful to Yan Ling who gave me the opportunity to work with a team of talented researchers and designers. Despite my time coming to an end in DBS, I am confident that this is not the end of the journey but the beginning of my UX research journey.
Petrina: Without a doubt, my time here in the IBG Design team has been fruitful and inspiring. I am thankful to Denys for believing in me, a Psychology undergraduate with little design background; Carol for always making sure I am not a lost sheep; Sana for imparting the wisdoms of research; Jacob for being patient with me. Also, not forgetting the rest of the IBG design team and all the help and guidance I’ve received. While my journey here at DBS may be ending, I will carry what I’ve learnt here into my future work in UX.
Final words
If you made it to the end of this article, thank you! I hope you have taken away something from our sharing.
This article has only captured some of the very many learnings and insights we have garnered from our time in DBS. As digitally forward as DBS is, there is still much room in making digital-first banking a reality for all. While we as UXers build digital products for people, how do we also build up the people, both employees and customers, to cultivate a digital-first mindset?