Akbank Mobile: Redefining the Banking Experience

Revolutionizing Traditional Banking with a Human-First Approach

Akbank T.A.S embarked on a journey to reimagine and redesign all digital channels of Akbank, with the Akbank Mobile app being one of the pillars of this process. The goal was to make banking smart, social, future-proof, and rewarding. The result is an app that provides a clean and intuitive mobile banking experience, thanks to its personalizations and recommendations.

The unique strength of Akbank Mobile is its human-first approach. By using contact thumbnails, simplified actions, and familiar phrases and concepts, the app speaks the user's language rather than using system-oriented terms. This approach builds empathy and trust, making the app different from traditional banking apps. The personalized area on the main page allows users to view smart insights to ease their financial life, while the AI saves users time by thinking on their behalf.

The app is available for iOS and Android devices in English and Turkish language versions. It was designed using Sketch, After Effects, Principle, Photoshop, Invision, and Zeplin, and developed using Angular JS, React, React native, .Net, PHP, html5, and javascript. The design process started in the last quarter of 2018 in Istanbul and was first released in September 2019. It is an ongoing project, continually updated based on user feedback.

Akbank T.A.S used a human-centric approach in the design process, employing a wide range of research methods to develop empathy with users. These methods included market research, questionnaires, user interviews, shadowing, heuristic evaluation, and design workshops. The insights gained from this research were used to create personas, user stories, and journey mappings. Several user testings were run to validate the new design, verifying the hypothesis on what people would expect from a smart, social, intuitive, and personalized banking experience.

One of the challenges faced in the design process was enabling the communication envisioned. The team had to convince users to give a portion of their dashboard and trust that it would be worth it. Through a lot of prototyping, they found the right size, look, feel, and content curation to help users own and love this communication with the bank. Technical challenges were also faced in creating insights and placing them on the dashboard without negatively impacting the app's performance.

The Akbank Mobile app has been recognized for its innovative design, winning the Golden A' Mobile Technologies, Applications and Software Design Award in 2020. This prestigious award is granted to marvelous, outstanding, and trendsetting creations that reflect the designer's prodigy and wisdom. They are venerated products and bright ideas that advance art, science, design, and technology, embodying extraordinary excellence and significantly impacting the world with their desirable characteristics.