Following the merger of First Gulf Bank (FGB) and National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), we needed to optimize the digital customer experience for First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) across their internet and mobile banking products.

Each bank needed to showcase a unified user experience while combining each banks product catalogues and services.

Given the customer base across the two banks, we had to create a consistent user experience that was familiar. We wanted to introduce modern banking conventions to enhance the product, while maintaining the banking image perceived by customers.

The new & improved FAB mobile app would be strictly native across iOS and Android. The goal was to create a hybrid experience across both operating systems, during the development of two independent applications.

After six months of design work, the FAB mobile application was released on the App Store and Google Play store in December 2018.

At the time, the app had a customer outreach of over three million users in the UAE, with that number forever growing, as FAB continues to gain more customers.

Our design efforts extended to conducting workshops and designs for FAB’s customer facing website, marketing chat bots and ATM designs.

FAB currently has over 4+ million customers across the UAE and all other GCC countries.

At the kick-off meeting with key FAB stakeholders and product owners, we were handed a 350-page business requirements document (BRD), for both internet and mobile banking applications. The entire document acted as an acceptance criteria for both products, which outlined how each feature should work and their respective user flows.

As the UX Lead, the team used this document to map out each flow and challenged key areas and decision points. Each challenge was validated by researching other banks in the region and from around the world, including challenger banks such as Monzo, Revolut and N26.

Through weekly workshops in Abu Dhabi, we presented wireframes and mockups showing the BRD flows and our proposed flows from our research. The objective was to elevate the new FAB products with best practices from around the world, to provide a more seamless user experience. This was also an opportunity for us to understand the bank in depth, including technical constraints, security and the relations with Central Bank of the UAE.

With iterated flows, we created prototypes that were tested with UAE locals and current FAB customers, to validate our design approach and visual direction.

We created wireframes and mockups in Sketch, and made a clickable prototype with Invision.

We split up into four teams. In each team; one person asked questions and one person took notes and further observations. Each team had a unique script with a  set of questions for users.

We divided the users across each team and asked them to rotate to the next team after they had completed all of their questions.

We were able to get insights from 26 customers within 3 hours of testing.

Our strategy for testing was to assess the functionality of:

• Registering for internet and mobile banking
• Making a bill payment
• View savings account details
• Make a transfer to an existing beneficiary
• View full product portfolio with FAB.

This project was based on the scope of 60+ features broken down into 4 sprint iterations, with each iteration taking 8 weeks. We provided 2 months support during the development phase after the project assets have been delivered.

After each feature was validated by end users and product stakeholders, we aligned with the respective native development teams to ensure that a correct handover was taking place, and that the assets were being utilized correctly through a design QA process.

FAB is now available on the App Store and Google Play stores, with over 4+ million customers across the UAE and all other GCC countries

After six months of design work, the FAB mobile application was released on the App Store and Google Play store in December 2018.

At the time, the app had a customer outreach of over three million users in the UAE, with that number forever growing, as FAB continues to gain more customers.

Our design efforts extended to conducting workshops and designs for FAB’s customer facing website, marketing chat bots and ATM designs.