How Vanquis Bank brought user insights and scaled research

Vanquis Bank is a business based in the UK and Ireland that works to help people achieve their financial goals. With the changing financial landscape, Vanquis Bank has been prioritizing digital transformation to help their customers more easily manage their finances. Whilst their customers are predominantly digital, the last year has seen their customers move almost exclusively to digital channels. This shift has required their product and research teams to create new and better experiences for their customers.

It was early on that Rhys Hicks, their UX Researcher, and his team recognized the need for rapid testing in their product design and development process. Since bringing in Maze, Rhys and his team have seen their processes transform by increasing access to valuable user insights tenfold to their wider business audience, and giving testing and validation a seat at the table. We caught up with Rhys to learn more about his story.

With their recent projects, including building a new app, a rebrand, and multiple self-serve changes, Rhys’ goal is “making sure everything's considered and that the customer isn't thought about at the end.”

Prior to Maze, all user insights were brought in through running moderated user interviews in their office space, where Rhys would observe and develop an understanding of user behavior. While this process served the team initially, it proved difficult to scale.

In doing solely face-to-face sessions they could only invite users within a 20-mile radius, where due to travel requirements, no-shows would be a given. In little time, the team had run low on their pool of users. This meant fewer insights that couldn’t support the decisions they were making. And with the outbreak of the pandemic, their need for rapid testing accelerated.

With Maze, Rhys can reach users across geographies without limits and improve response rates with some tests collecting insights from over 1000 people. While the team still uses video calling tools like Microsoft Teams to run user interviews with users, they support their findings with quantitative data from usability tests conducted in Maze. “It’s really confidence-boosting when what we learn from user interviews matches our Maze findings.”

Maze is great for Vanquis’ team to test usability across their Figma prototypes, see how people are moving through the flow, complete the journey, and see metrics across the individual screens. This way, they can identify where users are getting stuck and decide what actions the product team can take to provide a solution.

Outside of usability testing, the team has also run discovery tests, using tree testing to clarify the information architecture (IA) of their website and the app. Even more, their Head of Digital Transformation has also run internal surveys to gather feedback in less than a week and removed the overhead of internal processes. “It demonstrates the pure flexibility that Maze has given us because we control and own it. It’s been a lifesaver.”

To dig into their results and deliberate findings and next steps, the team navigates the Maze Report that’s automatically generated for each project. Internally, Rhys found that the best way to share their findings with stakeholders in a digestible form was to adopt visuals from the Maze Report to remix into their established processes.

“Maze has been great for getting the voice of the customer heard,” Rhys explains. Going to stakeholder meetings at a senior level and presenting user insights in this quantitative format has eliminated assumptions and given them the data they need to make the right decisions. Rhys explains that their objectives are now shared and considered across teams, from marketing to data and analytics.

Looking ahead, Rhys wants to empower the whole product team to run their own tests while he transitions into the role of UX Designer. “It’s been so simple introducing the team to Maze, and it’s so easy to use. Eventually, I’ll just move to do quality assurance across the tests we put live.”