Elevating customer experiences at Itaú Unibanco

As one of the largest financial institutions in Latin America, Itaú Unibanco offers a comprehensive range of banking, investment, and financial services to millions of individuals, businesses, and corporate clients across the region.

Itaú Unibanco recognizes that exceptional customer experiences are the key differentiator in today's market. Unlike smaller companies focused on a single product, Itaú manages hundreds of digital products that must consistently deliver superior experiences to millions of users.

Leonardo Aragão, Lead UX Researcher, and Renato Leite, Lead of CX Research Operations, are at the forefront of Itau Unibanco’s efforts to deliver exceptional digital experiences. Together, they focus on scaling research, ensuring high quality, and driving the insights that power the bank’s digital evolution and reinforce its position as the leading bank in the Southern Hemisphere.

Throughout Itaú’s user experience evolution, Leonardo and Renato faced the challenging task of coordinating research efforts within a large and rapidly expanding team:

To address this, the team created a method based on the Single Usability Metric (SUM). The SUM, developed by Jeff Sauro and detailed in his book Quantifying the User Experience, combines task completion rates, task time, satisfaction ratings, and error rates into a single, standardized usability score to evaluate user experiences consistently.

For the Itaú team, calculating SUM initially involved a series of 30-minute interviews, each using a standardized set of questions and tasks to evaluate usability. While this approach boosted efficiency and confidence, it soon proved non-scalable, exposing several key challenges:

When the bank embarked on an ambitious initiative to enhance every task in their app with new design patterns, Itaú's leadership recognized the need for a more efficient and high-volume approach to usability testing. The enhancement program was being tracked weekly by executive leadership, with high standards for both customer experience and time-to-market.

In late 2023, Itaú Unibanco and Maze formed a strategic partnership that complemented Itaú's customer-centric vision with scalable testing capabilities.

The impact was immediate and significant:

This efficiency has been critical to the bank’s evolution of user experience with a strong focus on customer centricity. Usability testing through Maze became a cornerstone of this program, complemented by the team’s process improvements and enhanced recruitment strategies, directly tying into a high-visibility KPI tracked regularly by the bank’s leadership team. Every successful usability test validated another modernized task, contributing to the program’s progress and ensuring a seamless, data-driven rollout of the new design system.

This combination of speed, scalability, and precision gave Itaú Unibanco the confidence and agility to tackle their ambitious goals.

The team at Itaú Unibanco has successfully integrated Maze across their development cycle. In early design stages, they use Interview Studies for qualitative exploration, gathering signals that help them refine concepts or pivot when needed. As projects move into delivery, they shift to rapid unmoderated usability testing to validate final designs and calculate SUM scores using success rates, dropoff rates, time on task, and misclicks directly from their Maze studies. This combination of qualitative insight and quantitative validation enables confident, customer-centric decisions at every stage.

At the heart of their operation is what Leonardo calls the "SUM factory" – a streamlined process where designers submit prototypes, task descriptions, and audience parameters, and receive results within days. Using a combination of prototype testing blocks, opinion scales, and open questions, the team efficiently calculates SUM scores across approximately 500 tests annually. No new experience launches without meeting specific SUM thresholds, and when designs fall short, Maze's AI-powered follow-up questions and visual path analysis help quickly identify improvements.

The impact extends beyond usability testing. Itaú Unibanco uses Maze to generate valuable quantitative insights that inform strategy and investment decisions at the highest levels. The platform has also democratized research across the organization–today, over 300 team members actively use Maze for everything from usability tests to in-depth interviews, making research an integral part of their workflow.

Itaú Unibanco's commitment to the era of experience demonstrates that speed and scale don't have to compromise quality. By integrating robust usability testing into their development cycle, the team has achieved what once seemed impossible: validating every experience before it reaches users, while maintaining efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

This systematic approach has positioned Itaú Unibanco as a leader in digital banking, ensuring each product and feature meets exceptional quality standards in a competitive market. The impact goes beyond faster delivery—it's about consistently exceeding customer expectations through validated, data-driven experiences.