After a catastrophic IT meltdown in 2018 that caused chaos and left its customers unable to access online accounts for several weeks (and TSB with a £49m fine), the bank has been working hard to re-design the IT infrastructure and keep up with the fast moving online banking market.
All the hard work is finally starting to pay dividends and TSB has released a string of significant app updates over the last few months from digital cheque deposits to spare change round-ups.
In this blog post we have reviewed TSB’s fresh new app look. Check out the ‘new updates’ splash screen and a user journey around the ‘Account Overview’ in the video below.
TSB – Account Overview
Alongside access to user journey videos, Behind Login’s subscription clients also get access to digital journey maps with downloadable screenshots to see how all the screens interact and pull out key information.
Check out the TSB ‘new updates’ splash screen and home screen features here:
Key Takeaways
The Splash screens quickly and simply introduce the new app design. Users typically skim read or skip this content, so focusing on visuals and brief content is an effective way to convey the message.
Apart from a flashy new UI, the main functionality TSB has introduced to the app is a range of different banking products called “Our Products”, a “Marketplace” of 3rd party offers and deals and a ‘Spend & Save’ features.
“Our Products” includes all the typical products and features offered by traditional banking providers, as follows:
- Loans
- Overdrafts
- Credit Cards
- Current accounts
- Savings
- Mortgages
- Insurance
- Business Banking
Each of these products is reflected in a menu item, which when tapped gives the user a brief overview of the product, its features and a link to find out more. When you tap through to find out more detail you are pushed to an in-app WebView with a big ‘Accept Cookies’ banner before proceeding to the website detail.
It makes sense to keep these items within a WebView until they can be built / developed natively in the app but the friction of the ‘Accept Cookies’ banner and the not-so-easy to digest content creates a lot of user friction.
The ‘Marketplace‘ is a feature that is now common across banking apps, offering users a series of complimentary products and services, such as broadband/TV discounts, gym memberships, insurance products or Will Writing services. Whilst useful, there is no personalisation of these services – it feels a lot more like a TSB up-sell than any clear demonstration of user value.
The ‘Spend & Save’ features are a good demonstration of value-add features for users, and again is now common practice across banking apps. Giving users the ability to create/access these products increases financial wellbeing amongst users, creates awareness of services for those who might not know they exist and also encourages users to increase their share of wallet within the TSB app. These features include:
- Savings Pots
- Auto Balancer
- Save the Pennies
In ‘Savings Pots’ users can quickly setup new ‘pots’ such as a rainy day pot, holiday pot etc. and move money between them. The ‘Auto Balancer’ which automatically moves money between accounts to keep your Current account in credit and reduce overdraft fees. The ‘Save the Pennies’ feature is a round-up feature that rounds-up user spending to the nearest pound and moves the difference into a selected ‘pot’.
In this blog we haven’t gone into the detail of each journey but from a quick review we can see they are in-app journeys with simple and concise language and steps to allow users to setup each savings product.
In Summary
The new updates to the TSB app are effective and make the woes of 2018 a distant memory, but there is still work to be done!
Within this part of the app, we would recommend a reprioritisation of the screen hierarchy to give features such as Spend & Save more prominence in the screen and focus on streamlining web hand-offs to reduce friction where possible.
It will be very interesting to see how TSB continue to develop the mobile app now the technical debt has been resolved and innovation can happen at a much faster pace.
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