Bank of the Philippines
After ABN Amro, I had the pleasure of working for another ambitious bank. The Bank of the Philippines was the first bank and is still one of the biggest in Southeast Asia. Since 1851, their businesses, products, and services have played a significant role in every Filipino’s daily life, as well as in the country’s increasingly expanding economy. In a world that’s evolving so quickly, BPI could not stay behind, and that’s why I worked together with Mobiquity on their brand new banking environment.
Role: Product designer
Focus: UX design, UI design, Mobile design, prototyping & testing, art direction
Agency: Mobiquity
Year: 2022
Award: Best Fintech partnership Philippines 2021
Brand new user interface design.
Working for banks is interesting, but I believe I can also say that it is quite boring. The main goal of the UI is to communicate the information in the clearest way possible, take the user by the hand, and lead them through the information. With that in mind, we designed every user flow step by step. In this project, we focused on every user flow after the login.
The grayness needed some color.
But still, we wanted to bring some color to the informative bank environment. The biggest challenge was finding the right balance with the primary information because the design elements should not overrule other elements — the user needs to be able to focus on relevant information and not be distracted by colors and illustrations. Our conclusion was to enrich the UI with extra color only at the beginning and end of user flows, like the navigation and "thank you" pages.
Creating a design system.
While designing, we created the foundation of a design system. We were with a team of five designers, so defining the visual elements was essential for an efficient collaboration — especially because all the communication was via video calls.
Cultural differences.
Filipinos and the Dutch: quite a big difference Filipinos are taught to be respectful to others from the moment they are born. This is also reflected in their working style. There was a strong hierarchy on the BPI team, so quick decision-making wasn’t on the menu. As you probably know, the Dutch are quite the opposite. They are respectful and listen, but in their own way. In the beginning of the project, we, as a Western team, were pretty dominant, but finally we found the sweet spot and ended up with a fairly democratic way of working.