The Barclays App features a Products and Rewards section that details the many products offered to customers. In light of the upcoming release of several new products, research was commissioned to look at how the information architecture of the Products page might be improved. This research looked at how products might be grouped together into new or existing categories, and also which products were most important to customers in their daily usage of the app.

Objectives

• Uncover customer perceptions of how products should be grouped together.
• Investigate which products users consider the most important for their needs.
• Discover how upcoming products should be grouped together.

Process

• Open Card Sort & Top Task - 25 Barclays App users openly sorted products into categories and ranked products by how likely they would be to use them.
• Clarifying Questionnaire - 100 participants answered questions about the new ‘pack’ offerings.
• Closed Card Sort & Top Task - 25 Barclays App users sorted products into pre-selected categories and ranked products by how likely they would be to use them.
• 150 total participants across three stages

Methodology

• Pilot Study Before launching the full open card sort, I ran a short pilot with 6 participants. The pilot determined that the upcoming products were confusing to participants, making them difficult to place into groups. As a result, a short questionnaire was created to give participants more context around the new products and uncover suitable groupings and category headings for them.
• Open Card Sort During the open card sort participants were presented with a list of products from the products page and were asked to sort them into categories that made sense to them. Finally, participants were asked to label each of the groups they had created.
• Short Questionnaire For the new products a clarifying questionnaire was commissioned to run between the open and closed card sorts. This questionnaire was designed to identify the best names for the groupings of these products.
• Closed Card Sort Using the categories identified during the open card sort, a closed card sort was created to validate those groupings. The closed card sort featured all products including the upcoming ones.
• Top Task Participants were asked to choose from all of the available products and select the 5 which were most important to them or they were most likely to want or need in the next 12 months. Participants were asked to rationalise their choices. This exercise was then repeated, but for their least important (or ‘tiny’) tasks.
• Analytics To complement the self-reported data from the Top Task exercise, I also gathered analytics data from the Barclays App on product selection from the Products page over the last 12 months. This data set of approximately 3.5 million app interactions on the iOS Barclays App helped illustrate what products current app users are actually interacting with.

Outcomes

• The research led the a proposed set of groupings and product ordering, based on direct customer feedback. This ordering was based on how likely participants identified were likely to take out a product in the next 12 months.
• The research identified some products which could be placed across equally across multiple categories. Therefore further qualitative research was suggested to better understand customer perceptions of those products.
• The results also noted several product names that participants found confusingly named, and so they struggled to categorise them.
• Finally, a recommendation for follow-up research featuring a tree test was put to product owners. In order to validate the proposed page structure.

The results of this research was a recommended page structure for the new Products page. This structure contained high level categories with proposed naming conventions based on the open card sort and short questionnaire results. With each category being given a selection of existing and proposed Products based on the results of the top task and card sort activities.

Due to the proprietary nature of this research, more detail cannot unfortunately be given here. However these recommendations were actioned and follow-on research confirmed user satisfaction with the proposed page structure.