I’m Joshua Sortino, a Miami + NYC-based designer, advisor, and investor, and I will improve your startup’s user experience, design culture, and team. We should talk →
Your best financial friend
VP of Design · 2016 – 2017
A concierge for your financial life
BFF is your own personal financial concierge. Each BFF can offer expertise to help you buy a home, plan a trip, or even help you find a new job. The BFF app onboarding journey begins with educational screens and security-setting preferences.
Choosing your BFF
The BFF selection is the most important step during the onboarding journey. Customers can choose their BFF based on similar interests or a preferred expertise.
Designing apps within a chat-based context
Open-ended text chat is incredibly powerful when combined with rich "mini-applications" that exist within, and benefit from, a conversational context. Widgets can be inserted into conversations to enhance the relationship and utility of the experience. After introducing the concept for widgets, hundreds iterations and user flows were designed.
Creating a marketing experience
BFF is not just a new banking app but a cultural shift in the way banking is approached externally and internally. BFF was branded to look and feel different than traditional banking apps. We helped partner institutions by designing webpages and demo videos for marketing purposes.
Show the product in action
The marketing homepage begins with a video demonstrating the app in action. Personas and user journeys from earlier design research were used as example content.
Help users feel safe
A financial app like BFF handles sensitive customer information. It was important to communicate the safety and security features that keep users safe.
Multiple calls-to-action
Making it easy for customers to find the call to action increases download conversions.
Strategic, business-oriented design
The path to creating BFF started by identifying customer needs, market opportunities, and defining use cases. Prototypes were wireframed, designed, and tested with users to identify which solutions best solved targeted problems. These prototypes added to our learnings and impacted decisions which led to the chat-based, concierge-powered BFF app.
Conversation management dashboard
For a concierge to handle hundreds of customers, a conversational management dashboard was designed with efficiency and accuracy in mind. Concierges (also known as agents) can manage customers, insert widget applications, and initiate or receive video calls.
Designing user journeys
Because BFF is an experience for both customers and concierges, the product requires extensive amounts of design that cover a wide range of needs. Thousands of screens, based on user needs and customer journeys, were designed over the course of a year before launching the BFF consumer app and concierge dashboard with multiple partner banks.
Onboarding Splash
Onboarding Education 1
Onboarding Education 2
Onboarding Education 3
Onboarding Success
Terms & Conditions
PIN Creation
Enter PIN
Touch ID
Choose BFF
Chat
BFF Offline
Launch Widget
Authentication Widget 1
Authentication Widget 2
Authentication Widget 3
Incoming Call
Active Call
Video Call
Rate Your BFF
Choose New BFF
Team Recognition
The small but nimble design team worked closely with business, product, and engineering teams. Each team member contributed in their own way to help make BFF a reality.
