Product Design for RBC Wealth Management
RBC Wealth Management is a complicated formation. it has to work with not only other RBC companies, but also other providers and vendors to function.
I would love to explain the project I worked on and how I overcame all the difficulties of satisfying multiple stakeholders, but for now I’m going to have to explain all the other things I worked on—the ones that are not confidential.
Contributing to the Frameworks and Design Systems
RBC Wealth Management design teams work on separate projects, but are not isolated. There’s a team that creates the design frameworks, while some of us others consume them to create applications as necessary.
Of course, there’s bound to be feedback between the creators of a product and its consumers, and we all contributed to the development of the frameworks. However, few of us went further to improve it.
Besides the design-based feedback, I provided the frameworks team with a solution to help with versioning and updating of the Sketch frameworks files. I’ve written a detailed blog post about it, with code examples and process description.
Tightening the Feedback Loop
With multiple stakeholders, the designs sometimes become the single source of truth. They have to be detailed, accurate, and complete.
Design teams were already using InVision—I took it upon myself to bring our process to other stakeholders as well. We used InVision prototypes to convey flows, comments to discuss features, and Inspect to provide exact measurements for development.
This sped up delivery of features and made it easier to meet deadlines.
What about User Research?
The detailed prototypes also worked for user research and validation. I worked with facilitators to create scenarios and tasks, and later reviewed recordings and reports to adapt the designs wherever needed.
Accessibility and Design QA
Our design team was focused on the Human-Centered Design approach, with advanced knowledge of discovery research, but very little quality assurance experience. The design frameworks we used were accessible, but the way they were implemented required additional attention.
I took the opportunity to not only improve the accessible usability of the product, but also get the team more acquainted and interested in accessibility testing tools and practices, for both websites and mobile applications.
Outcome
This is a tough project, but I created a design system based on the wonderful frameworks the team created that allowed us to iterate very easily, and I got to learn and teach a lot about invisible sides of design.
I’m hoping to share more about this project once it’s released in Late 2019/Early 2020.