For four years, I worked for Verizon as a contractor in a division specializing in developing new digital services. The first two of these years, I worked from their Silicon Valley offices, focusing my work on digital identity services and financial technologies. For this case study, I'll focus on some of the changes I lead in process, workflow and operations.
My Role
I worked in a dual role as UX Manager and Product Designer. For most of my time at Verizon, I was the sole owner and responsible for everything UX on the projects I was involved in. From definition to visual production.
The Opportunity
Our team had identified many opportunities, and I contributed to different products during my time with Verizon. The majority of them were in the realm of financial technologies with the intersection of digital identity. Initially, Verizon saw the chance to develop offers for different segments of the population, especially audiences of young adults. These audiences, commonly labelled as Millennials and Gen Z, have almost total adoption of mobile devices but have been traditionally overlooked by most financial institutions. This neglect has been aggravated by the new challenges their generation is facing.
The Approach
Our team immediately discovered that an essential part of the projects' assumptions at their conception was indeed false. The main culprit was the obsession with the labels "Millennials" and "Gen Z." These two segments consisted of roughly 25% of the people in the United States at the time. An attempt to generalize the needs of one-quarter of the population will result in the same cookie-cutter solutions of the traditional banks.
Our primary tool for validation was user interviews. First, we talked with people from our segments to know their real needs and behaviour. Their answers helped us identify sub-segments with specific challenges to solve instead of trying to satisfy the needs of 82 million people. We created cycles of prototyping, followed by interviews. Our product was better defined with each cycle, the prototypes had higher fidelity, and our interviews were more in-depth. We supported this process until the idea had enough validation to start development.
The Challenges
Our fintech products had many obstacles to conquer. However, I want to comment about some organizational challenges whose solutions helped us grow as a team. We can describe every one of these challenges as a communication issue, and each of these was solved by understanding the needs of our audience.
Finding a common language
If you work in products running financial services, telecommunication environments, and identity platforms (maybe all at once at the same time), you'll find yourself learning new acronyms every day. Inspired by the book "How To Make Sense Of Any Mess," we built a glossary of terms for each of our projects, in which any member of the team could contribute.
This glossary was not only valuable for defining obscure terms. It helped us simplify complex ideas into a few words and save time in our communications. It prevented using different names for a single concept (or the same term for different concepts), thus avoiding confusion. Moreover, it helped to quickly onboard new members of the team.
Explaining through stories
The first half of my tenure at Verizon consisted of developing ideas and then presenting these ideas to the rest of the organization and external partners. This meant a broad audience with different backgrounds, some with experience in product development and others that barely know how to use their phones.
It became evident that it was impossible to convey the idea of the experience we had in our heads with a list of features and services. We started to sell our concepts in the form of stories exclusively. This way, we could describe the experience and the outcome, all centred around users and their needs (thus having them as priority number one since the beginning), without having to go into intricate details about the inner workings of the concept.
Attacking process pain points
Our development team was adapting to Scrum methodologies. Due to a lack of experience in managing sprints, we spent much time explaining to the devs our intentions after each UX delivery and not working on new tasks. This is a known problem on UX teams that use Scrum (the infamous Agile-fall), and because our team was not ready to implement a team-wide Design Sprint, we had to find another solution.
As if it was a project inside of a project, we started, with the input of the developers, to perfection our delivery process. We focused mainly on high detailed flows (made directly on our Sketch work files), design guides, animation samples, and prototypes. All the time working in this definition of behaviour was less than the time clarifying and expanding the release. Not only that, but these documented flows ended up being very useful for content managers, internal discussions with stakeholders, and even legal reviews.
The Solution
In our journey to help young adults manage their finances, we found a clear opportunity to help families gain financial education as soon as possible. That's how the internally known project as Nico Money became the most significant assignment of my term with Verizon. All of the strategies mentioned above contributed to the successful release of this product.
Nico Money is a tool that brings the real-life experience of managing money to kids. They will have their own debit card managed entirely by their parents, which have a complete view of how the money is spent, define limits, block specific merchants, set automatic allowances or even create chores to give their kids an opportunity to earn extra money. Kids also get an overview of their spending habits. They can keep their money in a savings vault, so no money is spent accidentally.
The app was later rebranded as Verizon Family Money, and it was launched in the summer of 2021.
The Result
When I left Zemoga and the Verizon team, the Nico Project was on its way to a prosperous release. We had a product based on solid validation and a successful beta test, with around 90% of the testers describing their intention to keep using the product after its commercial release.
On an organizational level, the Verizon experience was a complete triumph. Our agency, Zemoga, started its relationship with Verizon with me as the only resource working on-site. Four years later, I was leading a team of four UX/UI designers from Bogota (plus two developers working closely with our discipline). All of them operating with different divisions and projects.