Identifying a project to add £8 million to the Barclays mortgage book biannually, I convinced Barclays to embrace a mobile-first approach.

My role: As a new hire in Barclays, I completed a product analysis of their Online Rate Switch product which highlighted that while thousands of customers were starting the journey on mobile each week, only 12% of customers completed it. This compared to an average completion rate of 62% on the desktop journey. The drastic difference made sense because the mobile experience was not responsive and so was impractical, if not near impossible, to complete. There were several rounds of data entry and checkboxes related to dense, tiny, illegible text which made both the mobile UX and UI horrible. If the 12% conversion on mobile could be increased to match the desktop journey’s 62%, it would bring in an additional £8 million every two years.

Process; To get buy-in and budget for this project I put together a business case which was favourably reviewed by a board of Directors. I showed them that if the 12% conversion on mobile could be increased to match the desktop conversion at 62%, it would bring in an additional £8 million every two years. The next week I was given a team of Designers to begin researching and testing a mobile-first build of the rate switching journey. With Design I completed several rounds of research, including in-person surveys and usability labs with mock-ups, to confirm that customers would be confident switching their mortgage rate online.

Outcomes: I left Barclays before the project was finished however the responsive journey was launched by my successor. At that time they were looking at adding it to the Barclays mobile app which gave me confidence that the mobile version of the journey had proved a success.

Key Takeaway:

Go where your customers are and invest in resolving huge dropouts - it’s often an easy way to increase impact.
Be confident to try a new approach when you’re confident of the impact it can have. By collecting and presenting the right data, I changed the priority and focus of a large team, within an even larger company.