About / Problem / Solution / Closing Thoughts
As a BMO customer who uses their Mobile Banking App on a daily basis, I wanted to investigate opportunities to improve BMO’s mobile banking app (and to improve my own UI/UX design skillset as well!). Below is an unsolicited case study and redesign of the BMO Mobile Banking Application.
By a 2022 study conducted by J.D. Power, it ranked BMO last of the Big 5 Canadian Banks in Banking Mobile App Satisfaction and last of 12 major credit card providers in Credit Card Mobile App Satisfaction.
From the 2022 study, the following four key findings were identified:
Overall customer satisfaction declines across nearly all segments, with the highest decline being for national banking apps by 17 points.
Financial health becomes a serious issue, with a ten-percent drop in percentage of consumers defined as “financially healthy” and a a seven-percent rise in percentage of consumers defined as “financially vulnerable.
Digital solutions missing the mark on personalization, with only 53% of digital-first consumers saying they have a personal relationship with the bank compared to 73% of retail-first customers.
Spending and budgeting tools have positive effect on customer satisfaction, with a significant increase in satisfaction but utilization of tools are flat with just 27-38% of bank and credit card customers using them.
With this preliminary information on the current state of the industry and banking apps at large for some contextual understanding. the next step I took was to conduct research. The objective of my research was to narrow the scope to understand the BMO-specific problems with their mobile app as it was performing significantly below industry standards.
I took a three-step approach to developing an understanding of the BMO-specific problems with their mobile app. I first looked into understanding the mobile banking user by conducting user interviews to gather a view on their usage habits and motivations behind how they used their mobile banking apps. Then, to narrow the scope to be BMO-specific, I looked into user reviews of the app on the App Store then clicked around the BMO mobile app itself. The intention was to align the sentiments collected from the user reviews with a specific flow or screen on the app. This three-step approach enabled me to identify a few key problem areas to drive the direction of my redesign.
In the initial scope of the problem, it was clear that all banking apps across Canada were struggling to provide satisfactory experiences for their customers (with BMO providing the least satisfactory experience on average). However, what was not clear was the “Why?”. For my redesign of BMO’s banking app, it was pivotal to for me to first and foremost understand the banking customer and the “Why?” behind their unsatisfactory experiences with Canadian banking apps before narrowing in on the BMO app in particular.
Here are some of the questions I asked: