App Store Strategy

Role

Lead UX/UI Designer. In charge of designing user experience and UI elements

Overview

This body of work was to discover how to best present the products and services to USAA members and prospects through images showcasing the organization's app in the iOS app Store and the Google Play store.

We took a deeper look at what the organization was currently featuring in the stores compared to what other apps are doing. In collaboration with other designers we first looked at others in the industry by doing a competitive analysis and uncovered some key areas for improvement. As the organization had done a full redesign of their app it was the ideal time to re-evaluate how to best present themselves in the app store.

The process

The app store images are one of the first touch-points for prospects and users who are trying to decide what financial institution to use. At the current state the app store images for the organization lacked alignment with the current branding and failed to highlight features that reinforced how the organization best delivers the mission through the native platforms. Redesigning the app store presence would create a unified vision and strategy aligning with the new overall branding and starting a benchmark for success measures in the app store.

Old store screenshots public images

We started the work by doing a competitive research so that we may present this work to business partners and get a buy in for the project to do an overall redesign. We looked across the iOS and Android play stores at the breath of competitors. Our analysis looked at banking and insurance competition, as well as what companies in other industries are doing.

We then identified 4 ranges of design the industry was representing with these images.I then conducted a facilitated workshop with people for different sectors of the organization to align on features. Making sure to include every aspect of our industry we created transparency and collaboration in a way that we can still have a unified message.

I then synthesized the information gathered with partners and came up with some possible visual solutions that would include the features and design that came out of the collaboration workshop. With this work we needed to make sure that our internal assumptions of features was what our users would value as initial information from our organization.

Research

So the next step was to conduct a small user research where we looked at past research conducted by outside agencies (Kylime FEB 2021 Credit card competitive review, Keylime mAY 2021 Auto Competitive Review, U.S Insurance Digital Experience Study, ) These research findings gave us enough data to identify features that users deemed important in their digital tools both in bank and insurance industry.

Using this information and our internal feature list we then conducted a research where we had users rank the features from most important to least. We also included open questions on app store behavior to learn more from their interaction with this environment.

Using the rank of features we determined the order, hierarchy and visual alignment of the app store images providing those most important features in the beginning of the collection.

Final Design

By conducting research and presenting the data back to our partners we have now established a need to continue to update this space, spend time and resources in this area to in the future help increase users and provide another area for marketing and acquisition. We also stepped away from device specific so that the work in the future is easier to change and not tied to any specific device type.

The strategy also included rules and standardization so when a team needs to make an update there is a single unified message and it is consistent with the branding.

This work is owned and all the rights of work is reserved by USAA