A new app design can look right in the design tool and still fail in a customer's hand. The cheapest time to find out is before launch.
I led the end-to-end revamp of a consumer bank's mobile app. Before customer rollout, we ran large-scale usability research on the new interface with more than 600 employees, and applied AI-driven analysis to their feedback to refine the app.
Why employees first
Employees are customers too, and they are reachable at scale. Six hundred people surface patterns that a ten-person lab test cannot. AI-driven analysis made that volume of feedback usable: themes emerged quickly, and we could act on them before the build hardened.
The result
At soft launch, internal customer-survey ratings rose from 3.0 to 4.1 stars.
What the work involved beyond the screens
- Fix the journeys that carry the business. We focused UX work on onboarding, servicing and cross-sell, cutting friction and lifting funnel conversion using behavioural and UX analytics.
- Stay in the release. I oversaw the team through functional testing, user acceptance testing and post-implementation review, working with technology squads to resolve defects and stabilise builds.
- Treat the rating as a start. A soft-launch score tells you the direction. The live product has to keep earning it.
The lesson I keep: listening is a delivery activity. It belongs in the plan with a date and an owner, the same as the build.