giffgaff, a mobile network provider in the UK, have always seeked to do mobile differently, right from the beginning. Their brand values are simplicity, mutuality, control, freedom and flexibility. As the business evolves, giffgaff sought to explore different ways to provide value to their members outside of just mobile.
As of January 2018, a series of reforms meant a big change in the way banks handled peoples transactional data. The data belonged to the individual and not to the banks. This allowed third-party developers such as giffgaff to build a wide range of financial services for their members.
My role was to help the business learn fast whether there was a genuine appetite amongst the existing member base for a financial service. Would there be a world in which a reputable mobile telco could also be trusted with people’s financial data? What would it take to build that trust?
In order to learn, we needed to create a clear and compelling story to help the team understand how our product fits into the lives of our users. We ran a series of workshops with the team creating personas, empathy maps and storyboards for why giffgaff gameplan was needed.
Using lean UX principles we formulated a clear hypothesis based on several assumptions and then through a series of interviews, surveys and polls we were able to take some user based insights forward.
What we learned quickly was that the brand was trusted, and whilst the notion of open banking would take some explaining, members were generally warm to the idea of being served actionable insights which would help them save money.
We created a basic prototype and conducted some usability testing with our UX researcher to understand a little clearer what genuinely was useful for users.
One of our first major milestones was to connect members to their bank data in a safe secure way.
giffgaff gameplan was leveraging the giffgaff brand to build a bridge of trust. We worked closely with the design system team at giffgaff, ensuring consistency and adding to the wider design system too. Here is a collection of some of the components built and utilised in gameplan.
Surveys and interviews can help us learn much quickly but measuring true user intentions is another thing. We decided to build a landing page for gameplan with the intention of getting people to sign up. This would help us learn the true appetite amongst the existing member base for a financial product from giffgaff.
Ultimately, having conducted many tests to continually learn about the appetite amongst the member base for a personal finance management tool, the business felt their wasn’t enough traction to continue down this path.
I have mocked up some designs and prototypes using updated brand assets of how the PFM tool could have looked.
