Commonwealth Bank
Daily IQ is Commonwealth Bank’s primary analytics toolkit for small to medium businesses. The bank had a massive amount of valuable financial data, but SMB customers weren't engaging with it because the interface was too complex.
I was brought in to lead the UX redesign and fix that problem.
Services
User Research and Documentation
Usability Testing
Workshop facilitation
Wireframing
Prototyping
UI Design
Deliverables
Fully annotated, functional and pixel-perfect design prototypes
Updated research documentation, including personas
Outcomes
Customer engagement increased significantly across the entire toolkit over a period of 18 months
Transformed internal stakeholders from skeptics to champions of the product
Despite being available for three years, Commonwealth Bank's Daily IQ, a complimentary business analytics toolkit, suffered from low customer engagement. This represented a significant missed opportunity for CBA to deepen customer relationships, enhance financial literacy among its business clients, and ultimately, drive customer retention and potentially cross-sell other business banking services. Our initial hypothesis was that usability issues were hindering adoption and preventing businesses from extracting the full value provided by the platform.
To understand what was going on, I started with a discovery phase to properly immerse myself in the Daily IQ and CBA business landscape. This involved meeting with the key project stakeholders to understand their view on the challenges and requirements of Daily IQ, and a comprehensive review of the research documentation that had been compiled throughout the project’s lifecycle.
Throughout this process we identified two key personas for Daily IQ – the business owners who had been the focus previously, and a new persona, the CBA relationship managers who worked with customers to make the most of CBA’s business services.
Technical constraints
The legacy technology platform Daily IQ was built on presented a major challenge. Put simply, it couldn't easily support the standard design patterns required for a modern web experience.
Rather than just designing ideal-state concepts that couldn't be built, I worked around the current backend constraints to deliver the best possible interim solutions. At the same time, I championed the business case for a modernized front-end framework. Eventually, my recommendations were adopted, a new framework was chosen, and work began on a full interface rebuild.
Following the discovery phase, I defined and implemented an ongoing cycle of usability testing and design iteration, directly aligned with the development team’s agile sprints. Each sprint focused on one to three tools within the toolkit, allowing us to rapidly identify usability roadblocks and test solutions.
From a research and design perspective, each sprint followed the same high-level approach using the Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework:
An additional focus of the research within each sprint was the validation and update of existing research to ensure we maintained a current picture of the product’s users. In the first couple of sprints I also ran some interviews with CBA relationship managers to define an initial proto-persona which was then added to the ongoing validation and update cycle.
Every single tool within the Daily IQ toolkit was reviewed, updated, tested and relaunched during my engagement with the Commonwealth Bank. Here are a few examples:
Daily IQ Dashboard
Daily IQ Dashboard
Originally a static set of navigation cards that customers had no control over, the Daily IQ dashboard was seen by all customers after logging in. Research suggested that customers wanted information about their business provided at-a-glance, and they weren’t always sure what each tool should be used for.
The dashboard was redesigned to address this feedback with a suite of new features and information, including:
Customisable cards with dynamic, up-to-date information that customers can add and remove as desired
Toggle between month-to-month and year-to-year comparison
Categorised quick links to every tool with clear information about their purpose
Cash flow trends
Feedback on this tool suggested it wasn’t flexible enough for customers, as it originally only provided a monthly view across all accounts. Some customers also weren’t sure what to do with the information, even though they found it interesting.
The redesign focused on making the information more granular, allowing them to view it by day and week in addition to the default monthly view, and by different account types (e.g. savings, term deposits, transaction, or a custom set of accounts defined by the customer).
Driving Cross-Sell ("What's Next?"): I collaborated with CBA relationship managers to design a "What’s next?" section. This provided users with clear, actionable steps based on their data, effectively cross-selling other Daily IQ tools. This feature was so successful it was rolled out across the entire toolkit.
Daily IQ Cash flow trends
Daily IQ Foreign exchange economists’ forecasts
Foreign exchange economists’ forecasts
This calculator was a new tool that I designed during my time with the team, and it was definitely the most complex tool in the toolkit, requiring plenty of research and sessions with CBA experts to understand the world of FX markets, forecasting and hedging.
The final result was tested with and received praise from experts in the field, including comments such as “it’s the simplest way to view all of the key information on FX hedging and exposure I’ve ever seen”.
Customer engagement
Across the full Daily IQ toolkit, customer engagement increased significantly over a period of just 18 months.
Stakeholder adoption
Because I embedded the CBA relationship managers into the design process, they quickly became champions for the product. The redesigned toolkit became a primary asset they used in live sessions with existing customers, directly driving adoption from the inside out.
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