Conducting competitor UX analysis helped me inform and guide my design process. It provided valuable insights into user needs, preferences, and expectations, as well as the design trends and standards in the market.

At the start of the design process I conducted user interviews and created personas to build empathy with our target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product I’d be designing.

10x were building the B2B APIs for banks to create, configure and run their products whilst also building the B2C APIs to consume and use the products. This required our design team to grasp a comprehensive understanding of user needs concerning API sources across our experiences. Aligning with the appropriate teams early in the process was crucial to adopting a design-led, user-centric approach. This proactive collaboration safeguards against compromising user experiences that might occur if we engage too late, post-API construction.

We researched how competitors approach capabilities and how they’ve solutionised features on their platforms. Example - Mambu documentation is in public domain.

We can find out if there are any gaps in the market, and identify features and patterns across geographies. Ensure we are designing agnostically and with market knowledge.

I employed Figma for sketching as a crucial step in my design process. It aided in clarifying concepts, swiftly visualising ideas, offering valuable feedback, and ensuring the continuous progress of the project.

Prototyping served as a sneak peek into our future, showcasing the inner workings of our product. It gave us a hands-on feel for the solution and helped us zero in on specific scenarios. We leveraged it for user testing, aligning our team internally, and wowing potential clients during sales presentations.

As the challenges we faced became more intricate and extensive, the necessity to expand both our team and our collaborative methodologies became apparent. Scaling up the team prompted me to initiate a document, crafted alongside them, aimed at aligning our efforts not only within our team but also across the entire business, particularly in our approach to design.

This collaborative effort was pivotal in establishing a unified understanding of the most effective ways to integrate design into our work. Recognising the significance of early collaboration, we established a practice of engaging six months ahead of any development deadlines. This proactive approach allows us ample time to brainstorm and iterate before committing to building APIs that could potentially impede the optimal user experience.

Moreover, our design process emphasises the pivotal role of research, recognising its value in shaping our solutions. This holistic approach ensures that our design decisions are grounded in robust insights, fostering more effective and user-centric outcomes.

At 10x we can use a customer lifecycle map to show existing capabilities in blue and new capabilities in green. This helps teams align on what we have now and what we need to design and built as our platform grows.

IA diagrams and user flows articulate how a user would journey through our features to complete tasks. This helps shape the next phase Block frames.

Rather than focusing on the details and the data necessary to create our designs, blocks and other shapes can give a quick idea of where the data will be and how the data will flow. The organisation and arrangement can be as important as the data itself.

High-fidelity prototypes mirror the actual user interface as accurately as possible. These prototypes allow us to meticulously outline various scenarios, both positive and negative, enabling effective communication with product, front-end, and back-end teams. This collaboration ensures our designs and development align optimally, creating value for both customers and the business.

Every feature in Figma is distinctly labeled, simplifying our ability to monitor ongoing tasks and completed items. This organised system serves as a reliable reference for future work.

With figma developers can navigate the file’s pages and frames, extract code information from a specific element, get visual design guides around the selected element for spacing and size and much more.

This makes handoff process easier for both designers and developers.

The goal of our design system is to help us achieve higher consistency, speed of delivery, reduce redundancy, create a single source of truth and have a shared language with engineers.

25% of our customers were not confident to make product changes to live products on their own. We were hand holding customers on the phone or in person to change and update their live products which wasn’t scalable for us or a good experience for our customers.

We witnessed approximately 30% of interviewed candidates fail to complete critical tasks within our as-coded prototype in Axure. The way we had designed and build the flow for creating new products was too complex with too much internal jargon and too much cognitive load, and not enough reassurance and in app help to guide users.

Routed in research so we know it’s something users want and need, UX vision projects were conducted each quarter or half yearly. Research findings are played back to senior stakeholders and or brought into our roadmap to build. The UX product design team is naturally drawn to collaborate on this in a decentralised project guild as we are very close to users pain points and needs. Product managers and key engineers are involved from the start to ensure buy-in and viability. A UX vision can give great direction to a business but needs to be conducted regularly to ensure changes from competitors or customer needs are readdressed in future vision projects.

Bigger picture understanding. Helps team 10x and clients get a grasp of what we are aiming for and have a point to define and iterate from. User testing artefact and new business tool.

Create a product in minutes using our quick step-by-step guide or you can choose to take a longer blank-canvas unguided route.

Choose from templates we’ve created for you - to help you get set-up quickly, or you can choose from templates which you’ve previously created.

We’ll ask you about the type of product you’re creating but choosing and adding the features will be up to you.

Design KPIs help us stay on track in driving metrics that actually matter. With them, we can gradually improve UX over time and gain evidence that our design decisions are actually effective in practice, and ensure we keep pace with both the development roadmap and ambitious growth areas with vision prototypes.

Conduct workshops with simple questions like: What do you want to have achieved in 6-12 months. Designers and researchers are highly skilled and it’s important that we continue to ensure we’re utilising the skills they have - both for the business and for their individual growth within the mastery, autonomy and purpose of their design careers. A group workshop enabled the team to learn more about each others skillsets and creates accountability about writing the post-it’s, sharing and saying to the team I want to do this in 6-12 months.

Our performance management software helped me and team keep track of individual and business objectives. The collaborative nature of workshopping the company and individual objectives created engaging 121’s, and Design review sessions. Additionally we were all very clear on what were needed to achieve by when across the year.

We are all working together to achieve the same goals: Value for our customers and value for the business. It’s important to stay aligned with UX, Engineering and product management to ensure we are solving for the same purpose. UX can do more to translate concepts into business value and product management can also intuitively see value in design, we must all stay aligned to ensure we deliver value to customers and the business and don’t create design or tech debt.

With a focus on remote working, post Covid it’s even more important to ensure the correct forums are in place for alignment across the organisation.

• Design review weekly - Share, critique each others work, workshop in-flight projects
• Lead PO/UX/Dev initiative weekly - Initiative alignment call with Lead PO/UX/Dev. Review in-flight designs - Upcoming roadmap items. Research insights
• Steerco monthly - Strategic oversight & guidance. Establishing how the project benefits are defined and measured

The structure of the design team has evolved over time at 10x. At the beginning we were building a lot of our front end applications as custom React projects requiring a decentralised model with a product designer in each development squad.

The demands from the business and customers were becoming far more complex across personal, business and corporate banking requiring far more design & research focus on 10x Bank manager and our end customer services for our Whitelabel app.

Additionally with the emergence of frameworks like Read.me, and UI Kitten offering features that would take us months to build we moved to a hybrid design team model.

The project had a transformative impact on both the customer experience and the business's bottom line.

• 1M+ new users and £10B+ saved within 12 months of launch
• +25% increase in self-driven product changes (from Q2 2022)
• Design team retention up 300% — from under 1 year to ~3 years
• Design review time reduced 60% — from 3 days per sprint to 1 day
• Task completion rate improved to 100% — up +30% from Q4 2022 after UX redesign
• Design team output up 33% — supported by a robust Figma design system