My time at Fifth Third was very beneficial for me in many different ways. I was able to experience many different aspects of the UX design process such as protoyping, user testing, and I also got to lead a few projects like creating the flow for the Android Fingerprint Login. I was also fortunate enough to be put through vigorous Agile training during my second summer at the bank where we were put into Agile teams and taught the Agile process from the ground up by the Agile training firm, McKinsey & Company.

As a member of the UX Team, I was tasked with creating many different designs based on the various business needs that were brought to us. I was able to take the design lead on some of these projects, one of which being Android fingerprint login. With this project, I was tasked with doing competitive analyses and research into how other banks were already using the technology. I also used the Material Design guidelines, which I referenced daily during my time at the bank, to see how Google outlined the best practices for the feature. From there, I began to create mockups which I based on the Material Design Guidelines as well as the existing pattern that Fifth Third used for TouchID on iOS. Because Android doesn't have a well known name for there fingerprint software like TouchID so I was able to create a name for our specific use of the software call One-Touch Login. This terminology was successful enough that they began using in their marketing campaign that was created for the rebrand that the bank went through in the summer of 2017.

Pictured above is the login screen using One-Touch Login.

During the rebranding period, I was able to work on the branding team which was a subset of the Agile teams. On that team I was able to help bring aspects of the new brand guidelines that were created by the marketing team into the mobile app. In bringing in the new brand guidelines, we also began to look into creating a redesign of the app. Before my time at the bank ended, I was able to create a few conceptual designs that I could think outside of the box and apply use new material design concepts as well as applications of the new brand.

In addition to the One-Touch login and rebranding, I was also able to start to build on my skills designing in the iOS operating system. I usually stuck to designing for Android, but towards the end of the summer of 2017 I was able to start practicing using Human Interface design of iOS. I started to create designs during the rebranding phase so I was able to help bring the new brand into the designs as well as incorporate the new design features that iOS 11 created.

I had the opportunity to be a part of the Agile transformation that Fifth Third underwent this past summer and it was a very exciting experience to be a part of. From my time there over the past year I have been able to learn a lot and it was very fun to be able to learn to two separate project management systems: Agile-fall and Agile. Because the User Experience team was already working in an Agile-fall environment, it made logical sense for our team to be selected as a pilot team when Fifth Third decided to hire McKinsey & Company. McKinsey is an Agile development firm that puts companies through rigorous training that helps transform them to practice Agile product development. Our UX team was split into 4 separate agile teams that had designers, developers (front-end and back-end), a business analyst, a project manager, and a quality assurance team. The teams would each be assigned a project as they were brought to us from backlog that the upper management would groom and keep track of which would hopefully allow us to push new features to the app more quickly.

We used this image created by Illustrated Agile to help show how our new process worked.

As a team we would have a meeting before every sprint where all members of the team worked together to plan the upcoming sprint. We had a backlog that contained all of the stories that Business Analyst created. We then would rank the stories by assigning each story an amount of points according to the difficulty of the story based on our ability to finish it within a sprint. The use of points with the stories allowed us to visualize the difficulty of the upcoming sprint as well as a way to see how every sprint compares to others over a long period of time to see when we had busy periods or more slow periods.

We would work in week long sprints where we would work on parts of features bit by bit and as the sprint would on we would also have sprint reviews and weekly retrospectives. Because our sprints were a week long, we had sprint reviews more often which helped us ensure that we were on target with the feature that we were delivering. More frequent retrospectives at the end of the sprint also allowed us to share with the team what things we liked or didn't like about the sprint so we could better mould the Agile methodology to best fit our team.

Due to the nature of working in an Agile environment, we were able to perform user testing more frequently than when we did while working in Agile-fall. Over the past summer, I was able to participate in a few different types of user testing. I had taken a user experience class in school where we performed a usability test using eye-tracking software, but being able to do user tests in a real business setting was very eye opening for me.

For one of our user tests, we performed a more simple A/B test in the cafeteria of our office building. We chose to do a modified A/B test because the problem that we were trying to solve for was more of seeing what users of the app would expect to see rather than actually testing the functionality of the application. During this, we also asked them questions while we guided them along through the test. We encouraged them to elaborate on why they chose one design over another to help give us insight to what they were thinking even though the problem was more opinion oriented.

For one of our projects, we were working on introducing a new feature to the app that isn't used very commonly amongst financial institutions so we needed to run full usability tests while developing the feature to ensure that the customers would find this feature useful in addition to validating the usability behind our designs. One drawback we had with doing the on-site A/B testing was that the participants were all bank employees so their knowledge about the bank and how they think the app should work skewed our data quite a bit. To solve for this, we utilized Mkinsey to help us bring in customers that weren't necessarily bank employees. This was very helpful because the participants still used the app, but weren't overly knowledgeable about it and they were able to give us more realistic day to day insight.

In my building we had a UX Lab where we had rooms that we were able to perform usability tests in that had the ability to record video and audio of the participant while members of the UX team would sit on the other side of a one-way mirror to help take notes on Post-its. After the test was complete, our Agile team gathered together to help synthesize the data by grouping similar notes together so we could visualize common pain points and potential opportunities. By having all of the members of the team present, we were able to think about how we could tackle each of the problems and opportunities in the most efficient way possible.

My experience at Fifth Third was extremely rewarding and well rounded because I was able to participate on the team as a fully fledged member rather than just being tasked with mundane intern work. I was able to learn a lot and it was a great way to expand on the skills that I had learned in my classes at school. Many people say the best way to learn is to actually do the work in a business setting and I can say first-hand that I came out of my experience at the bank with many more skills than when I started there. From refining my skills as a UX designer and participating in rigorous Agile training to performing full usability tests and helping bring the new brand guidelines into the native application, the bank has prepared me to be a more well-rounded User Experience Designer moving forward in the future.