Yoma Bank

Project Overview

Yoma Bank was founded in May of 1993, and has since expanded exponentially to become one of the largest banks in Myanmar, offering full-fledged retail banking services to individuals, SMEs, and corporate clients.

As a recent UI/UX Designer hire and former associate art director, I chose to join this team because of their strong design practices and culture that allow them to create concept designs and digital products that can compete with top digital product companies. The team was led by Lauren Serota and I reported to Kyle Becker — I learned the best UX practices from them to fast-track my UX learning curve.

Role & Responsibility

• Providing and facilitating products that embody a strong design rationale throughout (both in digital UI and in other key touchpoints across the customer journey)
• Rapidly generating a breadth of concepts across scales and mediums (both at the product and feature level)
• Designing scenarios of use, storyboards, wireframes, screen flows, application maps, and other artifacts that articulate product design
• Prototyping and testing concepts across mediums and touchpoints (mobile, desktop, retail, call center, etc.)
• Preparing design outputs and assets for developers to suit our agile development process

What I’ve learned:

• I acquired most of my UX skills and made a full transition into the field
• How to conduct user research and synthesize the findings
• Presenting design decisions in a professional business environment

Project 1: Yoma Iconography

Since I transitioned from a graphic design background, my first assignment was to transform and consolidate the icon system of the Yoma apps.

Project 2: SMART Credit

We built our SMART Credit product to make personal or business credit available to every economically active member of the population. We believe that a simple, affordable, private, and uncollateralized line of credit is a critical financial instrument for customers who commit to managing their financial lives with Yoma Bank.

As the primary UX designer for the SMART Credit product, I worked closely with our technology and business partners as part of a scrum team. I also developed an operational dashboard for our SCB team to manage and track loan performance.

In addition to improving the main product, we also wanted to target a new type of customer known as “non-anchored” businesses that do not have existing relationships with Yoma Bank. To better understand this market, I worked with a business partner to conduct user interviews and market research in the city. I then synthesized the findings and made recommendations for qualifying customers, implementing the disbursement process, and establishing the repayment process before bringing the product to market.

Project 3: Online Queue System

When COVID-19 hit, we had lots of restrictions around our branches. With social distancing, there was always a long queue outside of the branches and it became uncomfortable for our customers and our branch staff.

We already had queue machines at branches, but these are onsite queue systems and you can’t book online. Our project was to create an online booking system that could incorporate into our existing queue system and work for both walk-in and online queues.

For this project, I was the Product Manager and UX Designer. I designed the process with the help of my business analyst and brought the product from concept to finished product. As a product manager, I had to work with my scrum team and the third-party vendors who handle the existing queue system to deliver the product in a short time frame without hiccups.

Techne

Kyle created the Techne session to improve our design team’s knowledge and skills. When he left, I ran the session every Friday. We had a mix of knowledge sharing, book club, and presentation sessions, and invited the whole bank to join if they were available. This helped our team articulate design decisions better and present their work on a regular basis.

“Mike is one of the more curious and thoughtful designers I have had the opportunity to work with. With a background across a diverse set of design mediums, he really understands the way different touchpoints in a user journey come together to create a holistic experience. Whether it is in his previous areas of focus, such as print design or animation, new design skills such as digital UI/UX, or even completely new areas such as customer segmentation, we never were able to find a challenge that Mike didn’t jump into.” — Kyle Becker, my supervisor at Yoma Bank