Redefining the Developer experience in Financial services
Unification of fragmented services to one product suite, reduces by ~15% application development time
The problem
With Open API and PSD2 regulations launched in 2020, banks needed to create tools for external developers to utilize their services. Corporate Banking already had a non-optimal internal development for its new platform District and had to create a service incorporating external developers with appropriate platform tooling.
Role: Principal Service & UX Designer
Team: Evangelos, Michael, Morten, Aleksandra
Year: 2019 & 2020-2021
Tasks: Service Design, Product Design UX, Information architecture, Leadership, Interaction design, UX strategy, Customer research, Stakeholder management
Results & Impact
Designed the end-to-end service and experience strategy for developers, digital interfaces for the web solution, and positioning materials.
~15%
1
reduction of development time
services integrated
5
Unified Development suite
Key moments - trade offs
Keeping Technology Teams Grounded
When developers build solutions for their own work, bringing service design thinking into the process becomes challenging. I used journey mapping exercises to visualize existing pain points starting with the internal development process, engaging developers to follow a customer-centric development process for both internal and external developers.
Current solution development experience map
Showcase of intervention areas in the solution development experience journey map
Internal development process
Internal vs External Developers
The initial approach focused on improving the internal development experience while addressing minimum regulatory requirements for external developers, but this presented scalability challenges. To avoid this pitfall, I worked with the product owner to unify the internal and external experience using first principles thinking, defining the backbone of the new developer experience and ensuring long-term scalability.
High level developer journey within the unified experience
Cleaning the Noise of Development Concepts
Designing development tools can easily end in high complexity and overloaded interfaces, making them difficult to use. Leveraging my technical acumen and quick visualization techniques, I engaged developers in rigorous simplification of development concepts, creating simple interfaces that communicated complex logic and processes like rule setting.
Interface of the Solution Management dashboard
User experience for complex development concepts - client and rule/toggle creation
Creating an Ecosystem to Differentiate
Open Banking created a new market for banks beyond regulatory compliance, meaning Danske Bank had to compete with more digitally-oriented banks requiring differentiation. I designed the experience as a product suite—similar to Adobe suite—creating one central digital touchpoint called Danske Studio, a positioning and ecosystem that didn't exist in the Open Banking market.
Danske Studio positioned as the Suite for all the development needs
The developer portal as an entry point
Learnings
Strong Narrative to Engage Developers Building Their Own Solutions: When a team believes that building a solution for themselves makes them experts, a strong narrative is needed to engage them in the alternative of customer-centric development, with a clear path of getting there iteratively.
Clear Communication of Trade-offs: Working in highly technical and regulated projects, understanding the trade-offs in technologies, experience, and direction is foundational to success along with clear communication to all stakeholders, creating strategic alignment.