Mobile Banking Transformation

As the design lead Giacomo helped the Swiss Cantonal Bank of Zurich (ZKB) transform their mobile banking app into an industry benchmark. He joined the team several months before the app launch, when the app still lacked many features and had an incoherent visual design that did not meet CI standards. Giacomo identified the lack of a design system and issues in collaboration to be the culprit for the unpolished state of the app. Working in an agile SAFe environment Giacomo created a design system from the ground up, established regular user testing, created precise design handoffs, and built strong stakeholder relationships through thoughtful presentations and knowledge transfer. These efforts set the team up for success, enabling them to launch features more quickly, and ultimately raise the UX maturity throughout the company.

When it comes to visual design, there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Take for example the subtle color variations added to ensure optimal contrast and effortless theming between light and dark modes. The same goes for typography, where Giacomo created a versatile type scale with a clear, consistant, and purposeful hierarchy. When used wisely, color and typography alone can go a long way toward making a product more accessible and desirable to its users. But: consistency is key. This is where the new design system comes into play.

Giacomo's main achievement was creating and managing a design system that streamlined feature development and maintained consistency across all of ZKB's mobile apps (Mobile Banking, Twint, Access App). By establishing semantic tokens for colors, sizes, typography, and more, he implemented sophisticated theming capabilities.

The newly established Tokens and close alignment with development enabled him to design a dark mode. Trying to satisfy the branding teams expectations he created a unique dark mode – deviating from the common grayscale aproach. The implementation in figma utalizes variables and mode switches, making it easy for designers to preview the their designs in dark mode, and the implementation for developers was extreamly simple, as the setup with semantic color tokens only required adding a new color palette.

This project reflects Giacomo's design philosophy: addressing immediate business and user needs while creating foundations for long-term success.