Upon my first week back following the Christmas holidays, This week's session was mostly a slow reintroduction and reminder of how class should be attended and work should be completed. Most of the class was talking about the project for this work on app connecting and branding.
I learned that the last for my future project is to redesign or create a brand for an existing bank company such as AIB, Barclays, Nationwide, etc, and rebrand it into a more modern banking app such as Monzo.
The first task of this new semester, myself as well as the class were asked to head out for 3 hours and gather research on existing physical banks, build research on them, gain reviews of their customers and create a persona profile of my target audience.
When beginning I had to option to go solo or team up with others, so I would partner up with a class mate of mine, Nathan. We began on going to physical banks for reviews and first person perspectives of the banks.
The first bank we visited was Barclays, Belfast branch.
The reason why we chose this bank to review was due to my past experience with having to redesign their app back in college. I already knew they had mostly negative reputation from their customers about the app and especially customer service, but we decided to look upon their branches.
Upon entering the building I was a greeted by a staff member right away, asking if I needed any help, from that alone ticked off a couple of positive boxes. Upon this I asked what he thought about the banking up along with a couple of my friends and what I thought In which, occurred that the colours (Blue and white) of the app was incredibly bright and would hurt their eyes. Along with of course saying that their customer service wasn't the best and that their app can be ‘over crowded’ with content.
Aside from this my self and Nathan decided to look around the branch and from what I learned it was fairly empty, only populated by two staff members (from what I saw) and mostly elderly people.
Finally, I would go on to try one of their ATM machines myself inside the building and learnt that although their employees were very nice and welcoming a lot of their stuff was locked behind members only, which although made sense, it doesn't give any one new the chance to try any of their facilities.
The second bank visited was HSBC banking, Belfast branch.
I would then move on to the nearest bank near by which was another little known bank with incredibly negative reviews. At first glance all from what myself and Nathan could see was a single staff member on the floor as well as just one customer, who was an older man (his 50’s), which sort of sets of a not so great start as we felt sort of awkward from how quiet it was and just stuck out from the empty room.