RBS UX Internship
RBS Headquarters Gogarburn photo © Graeme Yuill
Start of something new
In the summer of 2019, I moved up to Edinburgh to start a three-month Change & Business Solutions internship with RBS. Walking up to their Gogarburn headquarters on my first day, I felt in awe of the size of the place. However, I was also curious about what I would be doing for the next few months. Most interns apply for Internal Audit, Finance and Commercial Banking. I had applied for the ambiguous Change & Business Solutions internship, which I quickly learned was the ‘dustbin’ category for roles that didn’t fit in a neat box. I was at the mercy of HR. But inside that dustbin, I found the one thing I didn’t know I was looking for: UX design.
I will forever be grateful to whoever placed me in the Digital team, as I discovered a field that I never knew existed. And as I fell in love with Edinburgh as a city, I fell even more in love with great UX design and how it can serve ordinary people.
What was the problem?
I certainly had an interesting introduction to the world of UX. I was given the challenge of improving the life insurance journey at RBS and NatWest for those three months and presenting my recommendations to the team. However, there was an unusual constraint at the heart of this. The Digital team had a sales target for AIG life insurance but were not allowed to explicitly sell the product on the website.
Why was this the case? RBS had made a pre-digital agreement with AIG. Before the Internet became ubiquitous, people would come into an RBS branch and ask if RBS sold life insurance. The bank manager would tell them that they didn’t sell life insurance products, but would point the customer to AIG who did. With most financial products, there are strict rules about what you can and cannot say. Nevertheless, it felt like there was even more rules to consider with this particular agreement.
The confusing mega nav for RBS and Natwest.
There were two layers of CTAs to get to the AIG life insurance page for RBS and Natwest.
The key questions
This left me with a few key questions to consider when creating my insights deck for the London & Edinburgh Digital teams:
1. How can we ‘sell’ a product only using compliant, informative language? What other means did we have at our disposal that would attract customers to purchase AIG life insurance but wouldn’t get us in trouble with regulators?
2. What were competitor banks doing in this space? What could we learn from their user journeys? Did they have similar agreements?
3. Who is our target market? Which group of users are most likely to be interested in purchasing life insurance? How might we encourage them to go to AIG via RBS site and purchase life insurance?
A flash of brilliance
During my research into competitor banks, I spotted a UX pattern on Barclays website which cleverly tapped into deep psychological structures of the human psyche. Because I was interested in psychology, I had been reading about Carl Jung’s archetypes that year. Jung had discovered through decades of research that there were universal, innate patterns of human thought and behaviour spanning different cultures and societies. Jung identified four underlying ‘motivations’ for the archetypes. I noticed these aligned perfectly with the four reasons Barclays presented underneath their section “Why get life insurance?”. Each appealed to a different core aspect of the human experience: to connect to others, to provide structure, to leave a mark and to explore their spirituality and freedom.
Barclays were trying to entice customers to buy life insurance by subtly tapping into these four universal desires. They were using human psychology to generically sell the idea of life insurance without explicitly selling the details of their life insurance product with L&G. I immediately could see how we could use this pscychology on the RBS and NatWest websites to good effect, by rearranging the structure of content whilst using compliant informative language.
How core archetypal messages mapped onto Barclay’s life insurance page.
Starting with why
I had also learned in my research that starting with why, like Barclay’s site, also appeals to the biological way our brains are structured as humans. In this instance, starting the webpage with the purpose of life insurance would help focus the reader’s mind. We often focus on the specifics of the product (what something is or does) and we completely miss the reason that it exists in the first place. I made it clear in my presentation that the purpose of life insurance – to protect your loved ones should you pass away – needed to be somewhere at the top of the page and the specifics needed to be further down.
Finally, I found that asking open ended questions helped users explore topics or products. Whereas closed questions could be utilised to ‘narrow’ customer interest to produce a desired outcome when selling. Therefore, we needed both the right open-ended questions toward the start of the user journey and closed questions toward the end to ensure users would convert. The question “Happy to get a quote from AIG?” was rather weak, but did require a “Yes” or “No” answer from the user. However, the “Yes” did not take them straight to the AIG website as expected: it presented the user with a dropdown with another CTA to click. This was certainly a source of frustration for users.
One of my content recommendations for RBS and Natwest life insurance page.
So what?
I presented my research & recommendations to my line manager and then also to the London and Edinburgh Digital teams simultaneously (which was a bit daunting!). I received some positive feedback from my colleagues and my line manager loved the work, saying it was “above the level some senior managers could produce”.
I learned quite a few technical skills on the internship, getting comfortable with Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe XD and Adobe Analytics. However, the most crucial skills I learned were soft skills: confidence in delivering presentations, communication concisely and accurately, and how to network & building relationships. I had a lot of fun at the same time – my team won the fundraising competition for the Prince’s Trust by climbing up Scafell Pike in superhero capes! Nevertheless, the best discovery for me was the field of UX itself as it’s set me on a course to take on even more interesting challenges in the future.