Case study: Giving the Chase bank app a UX makeover
By: Spencer Goldberg
Tags: App, Case Study, Product Design, Mobile, UX

Analog Banking in a Digital Age: Background

JPMorgan Chase is one of the largest banks in America and serves over half of this country’s households. They’ve been around for more than 200 years, starting with small banks in New York at the end of the 18th century as The Bank of Manhattan, and expanding during the mid-1900s when it merged with Chase National Bank (which existed separately from 1877 to 1954). Chase is still going strong today, with more than 5,100 branches and 16,000 ATMs nationwide. They have more than 250,355 employees (as of 2016) and operate in more than 100 counties. JPMorgan Chase has nearly $2.5 trillion in assets as of 2016 and is considered one of the Big Four banks of the United States.

So what’s the problem? Well, let’s hear what Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates had to say a quarter of a century ago:

Bill Gates famously said in a 1994 speech at a Bank Administration Institute conference that “Banks are dinosaurs, they can be bypassed.”

Banks are finding themselves less relevant in 2020. The financial landscape has changed drastically in the last two decades and large national banking institutions are struggling to keep up. We’ve shifted to a faster-paced, digital culture where banking is done on the go, and though the bigger legacy banks are adapting, they don’t seem to be doing it fast enough.

Banks Out, Fintech In!

FinTech (financial technology) is a somewhat recent innovation that is doing its best to disrupt the established financial management industry. It’s more personal than banks, quicker, and most importantly, mobile-friendly.

What are the FinTech Apps? Fintech is anything that leverages the power of technology to offer better financial services to customers. This could be a credit-based loan disbursing company, an online insurance policy vendor, a marketplace or an aggregator for it, a UPI service provider or more.

Specifically, Fintech offers easily downloadable apps for your mobile device that offer lightning-quick ways to budget your finances, save for a rainy day, match you to an appropriate IRA (retirement fund), and automatically round up your savings & invest in ways which are much easier and clearer than traditional banking apps.

Invest in Millennials

Chase wants to appeal to Millennials, which is anyone born between the years 1981 to 1996. (Ages 23 to 39 in 2020. Generation Z, people born in 1997 and beyond, are consequentially a target group too.) Millennials are leading the way in this fintech charge and quickly changing the landscape of banking as a whole. By tapping into the immense influence millennials have in this digital age, Chase can successfully navigate from something considered ancient and unnecessary, to a more relevant and essential staple in mobile culture.

Mission

What Chase wants me to do as lead UX is to find a clever way to introduce fintech accessibility to their mobile app. As it stands, their mobile app is as basic as it gets: take money out, put money in, check your balance, and move on. Any investment/insurance/budgeting information that is clickable will move you out the app and onto their main site. My first responsibility is to get right to the point and define the problem we wish to solve. We also need to ask important “how might we” questions:

How might we: Design a new personal finance management feature that embeds within the current Chase app, and flow naturally with its current branding?

My job is to thoroughly examine and answer this question through a specific UX design process. My goals and Chase’s have to align, and I’m excited to begin!

Let’s Get Started

What I’d like to do now is to identify the UX design process, and define each stage before going into more detail throughout the case study. Take a look at the graphic below to get an idea of the outline I followed throughout this process: