The co-operative bank

The Co-operative Bank launched a major digital transformation programme to strengthen its position in an increasingly competitive mobile-first banking landscape. As part of this initiative, I led experience direction across core retail banking journeys, redefining onboarding, payments, alerts, savings, and account management to improve usability, consistency, and customer confidence while establishing a scalable foundation for future digital services.

OVERVIEW

As UX Design Lead on the Co-operative Bank mobile platform, I led the experience strategy and delivery of a multi-stream transformation programme covering core customer journeys across iOS and Android, including onboarding, login, alerts, payments, savings tools, and financial planning features.

Working across a team of 7 designers and researchers, I helped define a coherent end-to-end experience vision for retail banking customers while aligning design decisions with regulatory constraints, technical feasibility, and business priorities. The goal was to simplify complex financial interactions, improve usability across critical journeys, and create a scalable foundation for future digital banking services.

This work positioned the mobile app as a central touchpoint in the bank’s digital strategy and established a consistent interaction framework across channels.

APPROACH

I structured the programme as a coordinated set of delivery workstreams aligned around the highest-impact customer journeys, ensuring that design decisions supported both immediate usability improvements and long-term platform scalability.

The work began with stakeholder alignment and discovery across business, product, and engineering teams to clarify priorities and identify friction across existing customer journeys. I complemented this with market benchmarking and behavioural research to understand evolving expectations in mobile banking experiences.

From there, I led the definition of a shared experience framework that aligned navigation, interaction patterns, and service flows across onboarding, payments, alerts, and savings features. This ensured consistency across streams while enabling teams to move quickly within their own delivery tracks.

Throughout the programme, I facilitated regular cross-functional reviews to maintain alignment between design, product, and engineering, ensuring that evolving requirements translated into coherent release sequencing rather than fragmented feature delivery.

User testing played a central role in validating interaction models and prioritising improvements. Insights from behavioural testing directly informed roadmap adjustments and helped teams focus effort on areas with the greatest customer impact.

INPACT 

The resulting mobile experience was recognised by customers for its intuitive navigation, reduced learning curve, and overall ease of use across core financial tasks.

Structured usability validation confirmed strong task completion confidence across key journeys such as onboarding, payments, and account management, supporting readiness for scaled rollout across the retail customer base.

Beyond delivery, the programme established a reusable experience framework that improved consistency across features and created a foundation for future service expansion. By aligning multiple streams around shared interaction principles and customer needs, the work strengthened the bank’s ability to evolve its mobile offering iteratively rather than through isolated feature releases.

My continued involvement helped ensure that user insight remained central to roadmap decisions, supporting a shift toward evidence-driven prioritisation and long-term product coherence across digital channels.

RESPONSABILITIES

• Led a team of 7 designers and researchers delivering the end-to-end retail mobile banking experience across multiple coordinated workstreams.

• Defined experience direction across onboarding, payments, login, alerts, savings tools, and financial planning journeys.

• Aligned stakeholders across Product, Engineering, and business teams around a shared customer-experience strategy.

• Structured delivery into parallel streams while maintaining consistency across navigation, interaction patterns, and service logic.

• Facilitated cross-functional planning and design reviews to manage dependencies and support realistic release sequencing.

• Translated research insights into prioritised improvements that informed roadmap decisions.

• Ensured solutions balanced customer needs, technical feasibility, and regulatory considerations.

• Established reusable interaction patterns supporting long-term scalability across the digital banking platform.

• Maintained hands-on involvement across concept definition, prototyping, validation, and implementation alignment.

STRATEGIC FOCUS AREAS

The programme focused on improving the clarity, confidence, and efficiency of core customer banking journeys while establishing a scalable interaction framework to support future digital services.

Key strategic priorities included:

• Reducing friction across high-frequency financial actions such as payments, login, alerts, and account management to improve task success rates and lower support dependency

• Strengthening customer trust through transparent system feedback and predictable interaction patterns, particularly in sensitive financial workflows

• Improving onboarding clarity and early engagement by simplifying first-use experiences and reducing cognitive load during account setup

• Supporting self-service adoption across savings and financial planning journeys, enabling customers to manage their finances independently with confidence

• Aligning multiple delivery streams around a shared navigation and interaction model, ensuring consistency across features and reducing long-term experience fragmentation

• Establishing reusable experience patterns to enable scalable rollout of future mobile banking capabilities, supporting iterative platform evolution rather than isolated feature releases