The Shift — My First Big Corporate UX Design Project 🗄

The Background 👨🏼‍💻

The bulk of my design career thus far has been working freelance and working on intimate projects with a handful of people. I had to be scrappy, think on my feet and had little resources for fancy design practices. Until Recently.

This past year I have been working for XE — one of the most popular and dominant currency authorities in the world. They have a rich online history, large audience, and a variety of services offered.

Aside from the culture shock I experienced from this change of work environment, I also experienced a stark difference in the types of projects I worked on.

Projects were deeper than just the work itself. They spanned across the company, had multiple working teams, and impacted more than just the end user.

With that being said, the project for this story involves about half a year’s worth of work and the wireframing of a major update to XE’s flagship product — The XE Currency App.

XE now allows users who reside in supported countries to transfer money with the company

With other 65 million+ downloads, the app is a popular tool for gaining information on currency related queries. With this recent update, the app would receive the capability to help user’s transfer money internationally and access XE’s Money Transfer platform.

Currently the app features the ability to check rates, view charts, compare historical rates, and get a market analysis. The rate alerts piece requires a login and now the money transfer piece would require a separate login as well. As it stands, XE does not have a way to manage all its products with a single set of login credentials. Part of the project would involve designing and developing a single-sign-on feature to make the money transfer integration feel more organic and to add something that the website already needed.

A brief on the project and my role with it

Single-Sign-On (SSO) 🔑

When it came to SSO, my job was to listen to requirements and the framework established by our developers and create a series of flows that showed the entire SSO system.

We would have to focus on product registration, existing login flows, password forgot/reset flows and also existing user migration to the new SSO system.

XE currently has a series of services that all require a separate login. These include:

• XE Rate Alerts

• XE Money Transfer

• XE Currency API

Wireframes created by myself intended for stakeholder reviews

The best way to manage all of the flows was to use Realtimeboard. This service allowed me to send out public links to stakeholders and made it easy for people involved to provide feedback/comments.

The wireframes went through a series of reviews and took months to finalize. Sessions would include developers, designers, and members from the product team.

Once the flows were finalized. I handed them off to our UI/UX designer to apply our colour palette and bring the flows to life. Below are some of the screens she created:

Designs created by my coworker and uploaded onto Zeplin for feedback

Updating the App with SSO and Money Transfer 📱

With SSO’s design completed it was time to move on to the XE Currency App and begin building out the design of the app with both the SSO integration as well as the money transfer integration.

Majority of the existing currency app would still be the same in terms of look and feel. The main sections of the tab bar include:

• Converter

• Charts

• Send Money

• Compare Tool

• More

breaking down the user flow for how the existing app and money transfer feature should integrate together.

Originally the money transfer tab featured some marketing text and a button to take the user to the web version of the service. With this update, all of the content from the existing money transfer app would flow into the currency app. Eventually the standalone transfer app would be killed off.

Testing 🔬

Once the flows were set, our UX designer tweaked the design to fit with the feel of the existing app.

To further reinforce our design choices, I took their work and ran a series of moderated user tests with XE’s user testing community panel. With user feedback, we continued to tweak our designs and developers continued to work on building the final product.

Once again we ran another series of moderated tests but this time we kept the user-pool internal. In the future, more testing will be done and we are aiming to continue improving the UI and UX of the app.

Next Steps… 🔨

With the app released its time to dig down and improve. There are a lot of points to work on. We are underway with testing, brainstorming, and gauging user reaction to continue helping users utilize XE to empower their international lives.

👋 To view my portfolio, check me out at: https://aadilkhan.com/portfolio
👋 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aadil.digital/

Check out XE at: https://www.xe.com/