PNC: Student Select

'Student Select' is to expand PNC's offering in the area of college towns that enables students to be connected with local businesses by offering a delightful PNC's reward donation user experience for college students. Increase student’s charitable engagement for local businesses.
  • Deployed:TBA
  • Client:PNC
  • Role:User Researcher,
    UX/UI Designer,
    Business Analyst
  • Final Delivery:iOS/Andriod Mobile App

My Contribution

Through the various phases of the product development of this project, I wore multiple hats, such as a product designer, strategist, team leader, and product manager. I was in charge of User Research, Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Stakeholder Map & Personas Design, TAM/SAM/SOM Analysis, Seamless Information Architecture, and A/B Testing.

My accomplishments were,

I spearheaded the UX direction for two key project priorities: first, deprecate the pre-existing apps on the App Store and, second, embodying the innovative feature into a pre-existing user interface to create a consistent viewing/donating experience for PNC customers.

Solution

Seamless exploration of a local business community. The sophisticated yet intuitive “impact portfolio” emphasises student’s influence. Students, local businesses, and PNC can interact via PNC’s touchless payment platform while providing endless spending experience that PNC has to offer.



1. Design Process

Although, it is a classic design principle, I employed a Double Diamond Design Methodology as its process allows for a lot of flexibility and potentially help me to come up with an innovative product development opportunity.





2. Discovery: User Research

Research Insights

In order to better understand the student touchless payment experience and engagement with local businesses, I interviewed 3 college students who are actively using contactless payment as well as 2 local business owners who are directly impacted by COVID-19.
We asked student participants to explain what motivates them to use mobile payment, how they would contribute to local business vitalization, and any challenges they have experienced.
For local business owners, I asked about their struggles to accept touchless payment options.
Through observation and reviewing the interview notes, we could see where college students could significantly support local businesses. We were able to build out a user journey map of a student spending money and identified some key pain points.



3. Synthesize

Despite the premium branding of PNC, it does not offer services aligned with a student's need. So, based on the research insights, we further down to define a product development opportunity.

Stakeholder Analysis

Once we finished drawing an entire ecosystem, we used Venn and Tree Diagrams to understand the interaction among stakeholders and the flow of value. It became clear that there are three major stakeholders we want to focus on ecosystem and their desire, feasibility, and viability.



Key Personas

Creating three personas helped us to build a better idea of who and what needs our product would be serving. The three personas include Sonia (a busy student who wishes to support small businesses), Gabriel (an out-of-state new student who is unaware of local business options), and lastly Christie (a local business owner who wishes to expand her business).



Opportunity Space

After further researching the domain & company, we explored more opportunity spaces by reimagining the current state with assumptions and reversals. We noticed most opportunities in the “PNC's Reward” space.



Market Analysis

By forecasting market scope(TAM/SAM/SOM), I was able to anticipate the value of this product that can contribute to PNC’s grow in the nich market, enhancing “PNC's Reward” offer.



4. Development and Design

User Flow

We focused on creating two user interfaces for student and local business users. Students experience a seamless frontend interface while interacting with local businesses via PNC mobile banking. As for local business owners, PNC’s backend workload could provide maximum value to add their profile with strong API support.
The key feature was to smooth out the reward point donation process and alerts system for reward donation opportunities.



Proto Typing

Since our focus was connecting students and local business owners, we spent most of our energy on linking two stakeholders as it is a key for this product.
We started by creating wire-framing and then, moved onto developing a Low/Mid-Fidelity proto sample for a usability test.



Iteration

Shown below are the screens our team has added after we conducted A/B testing with end users. We optimized for easy filtering function for student users to find local businesses based on their payment methods.



5. Final Delivery

A mobile app that assists college student customers in donating their accumulated PNC reward points to local businesses that enable students to be connected with local businesses.

6. Reflection

Designing a mobile application for a financial institution felt much more restricted in terms of conducting user research, creating use cases, and embodying functionality of the product we designed.

There are 30.2 million small businesses in the U.S. that are suffering due to an unprecedented pandemic. Still, there are not many bank platforms supporting them in a meaningful way.

I hope our creation can make a positive movement to support local businesses and PNC adopts this initials product development opportunity by introducing 'Student Select' to their student customers.

Overall, it was a great experience to present a vision of the 'Student Select' and the impact PNC would make for the local community.

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