User Experience Field Studies

ABN AMRO is a leading financial services firm based in Europe with operations in the USA. They engaged CSS to help design and test a major online initiative to sell Mortgages (Purchase and Refinance) through their Mortgage.com website.  The legacy back-end loan origination and approval system was very cumbersome and our goal was to shield the user from this with a modern, efficient user interface.   We worked with the Mortgage.com team to fully understand the legacy system and it's limitations.   We then created a UX design and interactive prototype to simulate how a new solution would work and validated this design with key business stakeholders.  Once approved, we performed formal usability testing and refined the prototype to deliver an optimal user experience for applying and getting approved for a home loan.  Mortgage.com was launched with great success and eventually acquired by Citicorp to grow their online mortgage business.

Bank of America engaged CSS to improve the user experience for its customers who visit retail branches.  They were about to invest millions of dollars in a new training system and asked our team to validate the strategy.  CSS performed contextual inquiry research in various areas of the USA to gain a deeper understanding of how branch employees learned and how best to improve their overall performance. This research was then rolled into a new design for branch software and training materials to improve branch staff competency and the overall customer experience for bank customers.

Our consultants have worked on over 300 interface design projects for Global 2000 companies and software vendors.Our range of expertise includes software design for insurance, banking, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, government, retail, healthcare, software, technology, utilities and consumer web product companies.   Due to NDA and client confidentiality around most of our projects,  we do not share detailed work products on this or any other public websites.