{"id":26894,"date":"2018-06-08T21:21:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T21:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/building.nubank.com\/how-we-designed-nubanks-bank-account-part-i\/"},"modified":"2024-01-23T20:55:34","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T20:55:34","slug":"how-we-designed-nubanks-bank-account-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/building.nubank.com\/es\/how-we-designed-nubanks-bank-account-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"How we designed Nubank’s Bank Account \u2014 Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In October 2017, Nubank announced our boldest product release since our revolutionary credit card: NuConta, a single digital account that allows people to save, invest and transfer money in real-time. NuConta is a complete redefinition of how banking accounts should work, and here\u2019s how our design team arrived at this new concept.<\/p>\n\n

Start with why<\/h1>\n\n

Nubank\u2019s core mission is to\u00a0remove complexity <\/em><\/strong>and<\/em> empower people<\/em><\/strong>. The credit card, our first product, has achieved viral growth among our customers by doing exactly this, but it\u2019s a product accessible only to a select population due to credit analysis requirements. In fact, we have received over 13 million requests to get a Nubank card, but had to say no to a considerable percentage of those people. Our customer base, which is nearing 3 million accounts, is already representative \u2014 we\u2019re currently Brazil\u2019s no.5 credit card issuer \u2014 but still limited when compared to a market of 120 million Brazilians who are unbanked or have to deal with expensive and abusive banking services that dominate the market.<\/p>\n\n

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An example of the list of fees from traditional Brazilian banks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

The next logical step in bringing our mission and user experience to a broader population, regardless of their income, credit scores or other barriers, was to build a product anyone could have access to: our version of a banking account, NuConta.<\/p>\n\n

The team<\/h1>\n\n

Designing, building and launching NuConta in 12 months was only possible because of how the team was structured and governed. The\u00a0squad<\/em><\/a>, as we call teams here, was composed from the very beginning of product, financial, engineering and design talent, none of whom had built something like this before. It was a group of unbelievably bright, but most of all\u00a0humble\u00a0people, who were completely open to learning and having their opinions challenged.<\/p>\n\n

This was, of course, a fascinating and unique project to be working on, so people couldn\u2019t avoid coming in with their premature views and expectations for what the final product should be. The role of design<\/strong> was as much about facilitating alignment between these expectations, bringing clarity to compromises and decisions, and replacing our biased opinions with real people\u2019s pains and needs, as it was about designing UI flows, copy, or making prototypes.<\/p>\n\n

Design in an Agile Team<\/h2>\n\n

As much as we designers like to structure and visualize our process, what happens in our reality is more complex and asynchronous than the diagrams we\u2019ve grown accustomed to.<\/p>\n\n

Doing solid foundational research before starting anything else can surely de-risk product placement, but inevitably delays engineering and thus time-to-MVP.<\/p>\n\n

What we did then, was to work in parallel threads:<\/p>\n\n