Proposing a widget-based tool to increase approachability and transparency in big banks
Award-winning project for UXathon 2025, a design-a-thon that I stumbled into (mostly) by accident.
I applied to compete in this event with a handful of friends from Simon Fraser University, but I was the only one who got accepted (in fact, if I’m not wrong, I was one of the two non-UBC students who ended up there?). But as it turns out, designing with people who you share 0 background with is super awesome! I walked away from the design-a-thon with new friends and a shiny first-place certificate.
My team, The Radiatores 🍝: David Theophine, Bolu Abiola, Jesse Reyes
THE PROMPT
How might we re-imagine digital banking services to make big banks feel approachable and transparent in their efforts to support Gen Z's financial goals and build lasting trust and loyalty?
THE PROCESS
Pre-ideation: Scoping and framing
The time limit for the design-a-thon was 12 hours, not giving our group a lot of time to conduct in-depth user research. The best way to cut down research was to find existing research on the Gen Z market and where their values lie in the context of financial services. This lead me to an article that gave my team and I some criteria to work around in ideating our design solutions.
Ideation
“What if we made it like Big Way, but. for banks?”
I lead my team through a sticky notes sprint where we spoke about any product or life experiences that we were reminded of based on each pillar we identified in the previous slide. (I was the leader of this process purely because I was the only one in my team who had completed a design sprint incorporating sticky notes before.)
This lead us to the idea of customization and theming, based on products and features such as Notion, Apple Widgets, and Arc browser (used in “Pink Spotify” screenshot), which are characterized by their infinite possibility for layouts.
Prototyping
At this point, our group and I had agreed upon the general feature set of widget dashboard, dashboard customization, and widget customization, we were lacking a cohesive user flow that would string these features together. While my group iterated on the UI & design system, I tied our primary features together by creating a cohesive user flow and planning interactions that made sense.
Final product
As a mobile widget suite that could be implemented on almost any existing banking solution, Bill’d aims to foster a sense of trust in Gen Z by facilitating a sense of belonging in their banking app through a high level of customization. By allowing the freedom to “build” a banking dashboard that suits their unique needs, we believe that financial institutions and customers can establish trust and understandability for lasting loyalty.