After being converted from intern to full-time UX research associate at Chase, I moved to California to be closer to the designers I was working with (and to explore!). I was the lone researcher amongst a sea of impassioned, young designers — and more importantly, a driven new Head of Design, Tim Parsey. Tim’s charter was to reinvigorate the design systems, language, and aesthetics of the Chase platform, starting with the Chase mobile app.

Given a six month time-frame, I led research for a core team of six to redesign the Chase mobile app. This research involved an up-front literature review and competitive analysis to set the stage for external and internal factors to consider.

I then ran multiple focus groups with iterations on the current and future-facing design systems, language, and aesthetics of the Chase app with varied banked populations to gather feedback that could be used for idea generation. In a round of generative research, we honed in on core components to our brand, motivations based on competitors, and scaled concepts.

After roughing out a new system, I used prototyping tools to run competitive, task-based usability sessions to understand how we compared to top competitors, and our current app (to ensure we didn’t leave any useful features behind!). I used core metrics derived from the language used in research and team affinity mapping exercises to ensure we were designing towards a shared vision.

The result was an application that launched on iOS from 3.4 stars to 5 stars with over 26,000 reviews.