← Work

Citibank Beacon App

• Company: Citibank

• Platform: iOS

• Year: 2017

• Role: UX Designer

• Project Design Team Size: 1 Creative Director, 2 UX Designers, 2 Visual Designers

Starting from scratch

In my first experience working at an agency, I joined the Publicis Sapient Citibank team to focus on delivering a new app for their Citibank Ventures division. The goal of the app was to help customers reduce their debt by gamifying opportunities to save. So the idea was that we could present customers with an engaging app experience that rewarded them for looking at their spending and figuring out ways to set reasonable goals that they could meet. When the customer met their goals, they be rewarded with badges and notifications to keep them motivated and on track to pay down their credit cards.

When I started on the team, I focused on working through the different types of transactions and categories that a customer might be able to reduce their spending in. I created a map of these categories and explored some of the different types of gaming dynamics we could bring into the app. Working with our partners at Citibank, we created a few different concepts for how the core experience could work; exploring different ideas around budgeting flows.

Polishing the experience

Once we settled on the basic app idea, we thought about how we wanted customers to onboard, create their account, and connect their financial institutions, so that we could start to analyze their spending trends. We then thought about the different types of core app flows that would support budget creation.

We continued to present updates based on their feedback and I worked with two visual designers to complete the full app design. The Creative Director and I flew out to Dallas Texas where Citibank's engineering team is primarily located. I worked with the engineers in Dallas to fully understand the app, answer questions they had, and troubleshoot different technical issues they saw with some of our designs.

Seeing the results

Citibank launched the Beacon app as a test within the Citibank Ventures program and it was on the App Store for a period of time before eventually being removed. The experience that Citibank had around this app was, I think, invaluable in helping them understand how they could approach customers in an innovative way when it comes to helping them create wealth and reach their financial goals.

Artsy Payments →