Founded in 2001 as SAV Credit, NewDay has grown into an established financial services company with 5.4 million customers. This has been achieved through 3 own-brand products and a range of co-branded credit products with major retailers such as Amazon, House of Fraser and Debenhams.
Building upon their success to ensure they did not become stagnant in an ever more competitive domain, NewDay required a steady and repeatable stream of technological innovations. We therefore provided them with a robust UX process coupled with user research, Ux design and strategic support to help develop new propositions with true customer focus.
The client’s market conditions
The credit market has seen unprecedented change as technology and customer expectations develop rapidly and new players enter the market. NewDay understands that product development and innovation play a crucial role in their success, but lacked a reliable and repeatable process to deliver success. They needed to learn quickly and work collaboratively to innovate in the right direction.
Creating a solution to meet their needs
We could see a great opportunity to improve the process at NewDay, integrating lean generative and evaluative research methods to inform the development backlog and create new product ideas. We identified the perfect means of realising this change, by establishing a user-centered process and embedding key people in-house. This approach allowed us to collaborate closely with NewDay on generative user research, strategic proposition development, UX design, creative input and testing.
The benefits of our approach
Our user-centered approach integrated rapid Agile research and design techniques into the already established NewDay development process. Our team consisted of UX Designers, User Researchers and Visual (UI) Designers, all supported by senior members of The UX Agency's team. Our team worked collaboratively to ensure that the process was effectively embedded and could be scaled effectively across the business.
We devised a programme that best aligned with the organisation’s level of UX maturity. Our primary goal was to deliver an exemplar project to demonstrate to NewDay's senior management how a research-led approach to design coupled with agile, iterative working could really drive the business forward, whilst enabling the teams to be reactive to internal to demands and business pivots. Above all, our methodology brought repeatable successes that continues to generate innovations, installing a stream of continuous innovation that is fast and low risk.
Driving innovation through research
Our research team defined a user research framework for both generative and evaluative research which was carried out in parallel. This combination of generative and evaluative was key to maintain a steady stream of success.
Generative research involved continuous research into NewDay propositions, developing customer personas to evolve the understanding and uncover opportunities for the project and broader NewDay initiatives and products. The strength of generative research is in how it leads to greater understanding of propositions and their viability. The process has allowed the team to effectively target customers for each proposition, ensuring the business moves in the right direction, delivering exciting new propositions that meet customer needs.
We continue to work with NewDay to roll out innovative products driven by generative research. These insights also serve other divisions in the business.
Evaluative research involved concept testing and validation of the UI to ensure it is fit for purpose, creating UI improvements through an iterative testing approach. Concept testing was performed at regular intervals to ensure products were intuitive, easy to use and met a clear customer need. It also evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of the product, guiding priorities and suggesting opportunities for improvement.
Identifying the results of our approach
We deployed the rapid UX process into their development process to generate insights, opportunities and testable concepts through a repeatable, reliable and controlled method.
They have taught us that Research and Design is a team sport
Generative research has stopped NewDay from wasting time and money by ensuring developments are in the right direction. By putting their innovations on the right path from the beginning, they are making greater progress more cheaply and with less risk than ever before.
Our approach to product and service innovation was proven to be:
Fast; enabling NewDay to generate innovative propositions within a matter of days
Highly flexible; allowing NewDay to increase UX resource based on their need.
Collaborative; working as a single team from start to finish
Low-risk; allowing NewDay to understand, design, test and iterate without burning through their project budget.
How NewDay have changed after working with The UX Agency
Within the first 3 months working with NewDay, our impact was felt across the business. Decisions are now being made based on genuine customer needs and challenges and this sentiment was echoed by NewDay's former CEO in his leaving speech.
It was a magic moment to see a group talking to customers… My advice - keep talking to customers!
In all, our engagement with NewDay was seen as a huge success. NewDay are well on their way to building a culture of innovation through user-centred design.
