Worked on the full restyle of the SME app, from pre-launch research to implementation. Ran preference testing with SME customers and an open card sort with 58 business customers, informing the visual direction, the navigation model and the product taxonomy. Contributed to the new design system and integrated key product features.
The bank runs two mobile apps, one for private customers and one for businesses, across 8 CEE markets. The business app was to be restyled, but budget ruled out a design system of its own, so the restyle had to reuse the components already built for the private app.
That produced the actual design question, which was not a visual one: how do you make two products feel different to a customer who uses both every day, when the structure, the components and the interactions underneath are almost identical?
Structure, components and interactions were locked. That left colour and imagery as the only two variables, and the product taxonomy as the one place where the business app could genuinely diverge from the private one.
Rather than showing users two finished designs and asking which they preferred, I tested each variable on its own, so the result would say something specific. Both were unmoderated preference tests on static screens, with business account holders in European markets.
Colour was tested on the home screen, using identical components with different combinations of background and cards.
Imagery was tested on the payments and "More" pages, in three treatments: photography (warm, and unifying across the two products), flat icons per item (functional, compact), or no visual elements at all (dense, scannable).
No visual: text only. The densest of the three and the fastest to scan. Icons: a mark per item. More functional in tone, and the cards stay compact. Photography: warm, and it makes the two products look like one.
We ran an unmoderated open card sort to see how business customers themselves group banking products: 58 participants across 12 European markets, sorting 29 cards representing the business product range. I defined the card set and the study objectives; recruitment criteria were agreed with the bank's in-house service designers.