As a Product Design Trainee at Société Générale, I designed solutions for the company's financial products in tandem with stakeholders and developers utilising their Design System and methodology. Furthermore, I led and assisted with user research, ideation and prototyping as well as audited existing product interfaces.
The following examples include two web applications that I worked on throughout my 11-month trainee programme and were validated by the company for me to share in my portfolio. However, due to the company’s confidential nature, I’m unable to disclose any details.
Using the Societe Generale’s design system, I developed an internal tool with multiple functionalities such as case management (to monitor different cases and track the KPIs) and dataset manipulation. For this project with time limitations, we jumped straight to high-fidelity prototyping. I worked closely with the users and other stakeholders to study their current solutions and their needs. The project was broken down into many sections which we worked on one by one to complete the entire application. We set up weekly meetings to track progress and hold discussions which helped us achieve great results in short time.
As well as contributing to the Design System directly (reviewing components and variants, fixing mistakes) I reviewed the Societe Generale’s Design System documentation application. The application itself is the ultimate source of truth used mostly by designers to communicate with the developers, point out the elements and how to correctly build them in code. However, as a designer on the team, I noticed that the landing page itself is not used and all the necessary information is accessed through a side panel. My hypothesis was later confirmed as I found that many people (including developers) had no idea that the landing page was even scrollable! Therefore, I conducted a study to find out how we could make the page more useful not just for us designers but also for people who have no idea what a Design System is. This includes developers as well as product owners. For efficiency, I have chosen to conduct a short survey with carefully formulated questions in order to get best possible results. The following visuals have been validated by the company for me to share and will illustrate some of my research findings.
Benchmarking
I started off with the benchmarking. Studying and analysing landing pages for other Design Systems such as Adobe, NewsKit, Apple, Gov.uk, Material and others. I inspected and took notes on the content, structure, what I found was useful, and interesting as well as what they have in common and gathered it together.
Users
Next step, I looked at the users, who are they, what are their goals, frustrations, concerns, and what would they benefit from.
Survey Synthesis
Wireframing
Wireframing. Ideating the new structure based on the feedback collected through user research.