Project Overview:
Yoma Bank was founded in May of 1993, and since has expanded exponentially to become one of the largest banks in Myanmar, offering full-fledged retail banking services to individuals, SMEs, and corporate clients.
As a recent UI/UX Designer hire and former associate art director, I chose to join this team because of their strong design practices and culture that allow them to create concept designs and digital products that can compete with top digital product companies. It is led by Lauren Serota and I reported to Kyle Becker, I learned the best UX practices from them to fast-track my UX learning curve.
Role & Responsibility:
Providing and facilitating products that embody a strong design rationale throughout (both in digital UI and in other key touchpoints across the customer journey)
Rapidly generating a breadth of concepts across scales and mediums (e.g. both at the product and feature level)
Designing scenarios of use, storyboards, wireframes, screen flows, application maps, and other artifacts that articulate product design
Prototyping and testing concepts across mediums and touchpoints (mobile, desktop, retail, call center, etc)
Preparing design outputs and assets for developers to suit our agile development process
✅ Summary of what I’ve learned
I acquired most of my UX skills and made a full transition into the field
How to conduct user research and synthesize the findings
Presenting design decisions in a professional business environment
Project: 1
Since I transited from the graphics design background my 1st assignment is to transform and consolidate the icon system of the Yoma apps.
Yoma Iconography
Project: 2
We built our Smart Credit product to make personal or business credit available to every economically active member of the population. We believe that a simple, affordable, private, and uncollateralized line of credit is a critical financial instrument for customers who commit to managing their financial lives with Yoma Bank.
SMART Credit/
Credit Business
As the primary UX designer for the SMART Credit product, I work closely with our technology and business partners as part of a scrum team.
I also developed an operational dashboard for our SCB team to manage and track loan performance.
In addition to improving the main product, we also wanted to target a new type of customer known as "non-anchored" businesses that do not have existing relationships with Yoma Bank. To better understand this market, I worked with a business partner to conduct user interviews and market research in the city. I then synthesized the findings and made recommendations for qualifying customers, implementing the disbursement process, and establishing the repayment process before bringing the product to market.
Project: 3
When COVID-19 hit, we have lots of restrictions around our branches. With social distancing, there is always a long queue outside of the branches and it became uncomfortable for our customers and our branch staffs.
We already have a Queue machine at branches, but these are onsite queue system and you can’t book online. Our project is to create an online booking system that can incorporate into our existing queue system that works for both walk-in and online queues.
Online Queue System
For this project, I am the Product Manager and UX Designer. I design the process with the help of my business analyst and brought the product from concept to finished product. As a product manager, I have to work with my scrum team and 3rd party vendors who handle the existing queue system to deliver the product in a short time frame without hiccups.
Role & Responsibility
Techne
Kyle created Techne session to improve our design team's knowledge and skills. When he left, I ran the session every Friday. We have a mixed of knowledge sharing, book club, and presentation sessions. We invited the whole bank to join if they were available. This helped our team articulating design decisions better and present their work on a regular basis.
Recommendation from my supervisor
I worked with Mike during our time at Yoma Bank while it underwent its digital transformation. Mike is one of the more curious and thoughtful designers I have had the opportunity to work with. With a background across a diverse set of design mediums, he really understands the way different touchpoints in a user journey come together to create a holistic experience. Whether it is in his previous areas of focus, such as print design or animation, new design skills such as digital UI/UX, or even completely new areas such as customer segmentation, we never were able to find a challenge that Mike didn’t jump into (or people he couldn’t collaborate with). This curiosity and openness makes working with Mike a pleasure, and I look forward to watching his skill set grow and hope for an opportunity to work with him again in the future.
