Refreshing a Dated Mobile App

Through some generative research about the public’s perception of RBC Royal Bank, the newly-structured Design team at RBC Digital uncovered that the brand was viewed as “someone else’s bank” that “doesn’t care about the little people” who use their products. The insights were distributed just as the RBC Mobile app was undergoing a major refresh. The plan was to finally incorporate some key features that clients had been asking for, and improving ones that had missed the mark. 

The app store was full of negative comments from clients who demanded replies and often received canned responses that furthered the bank’s reputation as cold and tone-deaf to the needs of its audience.

Even in the midst of the negativity, it was an exciting and critical time in the Design team’s journey. The Content Designers had just been handed new voice and tone guidelines, and no one had yet had the opportunity to put them into practice.

As part of the mobile design team tasked with the refresh, I wanted to use the app’s fresh start as a way to introduce the new voice guidelines, which emphasized things like familiarity and empathy, throughout the app. 

I also wanted to update the often overlooked description in the Google Play Store. Since our customers were already using the Store as a place to start dialogue with us, I suggested that the description might be a good place to speak directly to the people. If we viewed the Store as a place to sell the new and improved RBC Mobile app, then the description was the place we should address our customers and acknowledge our shortcomings. The goal was to seem like we were finally open for discussion and ready to put the customer first. The older app descriptions tended to pump up the features the business valued over the ones our customers did. And we sometimes oversold things that our customers told us they expected as a minimum. 

Traditionally, the description had been overtaken by paragraphs of cryptic legal disclaimers. The disclaimers factored into the character limit for our description, making it nearly impossible to say something meaningful with the limited space we had left. I initiated and led sessions with our legal and compliance partners to demonstrate the value of keeping our disclaimers concise. We worked together to find a compromise that both satisfied legal requirements and left us space to communicate the real value of the app.

Beyond simply abbreviating the text, I also proposed that we make the disclaimers easier to understand by using more natural language. If we wanted our customers to trust that we had their best interests at heart, they needed to feel as though we weren’t try to trick them through the use of garbled legal terminology.

The updated description was meant to be refreshing, if not slightly jarring, in its ability to address its audience with such frank sincerity. We told customers that we’d heard their complaints and we were ready to acknowledge our shortcomings. It sounded like it was written by people, for people. And it encouraged our customers to ask for the features they’d find most valuable, suggesting that we might finally be ready listen to what they wanted instead prioritizing our own objectives.

The shift in content direction is not something that numbers and results can neatly measure back to, but I saw it as a step in rebuilding our customer relationship and reaching out more humbly to those who may have turned away from us. The combination of a new, more self-aware tone and improved functionality led to a higher rating in the app store.