How Henrik has fostered a design culture of data-informed decisions at N26
Henrik is a Senior Strategic Designer at N26, a Berlin-based mobile bank that focuses on offering seamless, digital, and affordable experience for its customers. We spoke with Henrik about how he leverages data-informed metrics to meet both the needs of design and business.
By Henrik Hagedorn, d.MBA alum
Henrik’s current role as a Senior Strategic Designer at N26 wasn’t a typical posted job, but was instead a business case pitched to N26’s head of design. The head of design had plans of establishing a strategic design role, but he wasn’t entirely clear yet what this role would entail. Henrik and he began concepting what strategic design should encompass at N26 and zeroed-in on the need to be more data-informed, eventually deciding on a strategy that compliments what’s learned from qualitative data from user research and further expanding on it with hard numbers.
“The main concept for how I pitched this role was that product design is all about designing the thing right. What was sort of missing is to design the right thing. This is where strategic design comes into place.”
Henrik has leveraged his role to create metrics of success that satisfy the needs of both humans and the business through hosting bi-weekly data and design sessions. These sessions encourage colleagues to show up with something they’d like to test and they brainstorm together on how to measure this successfully. This open, relaxed forum allow designers to learn from business colleagues and vice-versa. To complement the forum, Henrik has also created an in-house Experience Metrics Canvas, which is a framework that leads people into thinking how they can turn a business or design challenge into a metric that can capture both business and human goals, including cheat sheets like, “How to Create a Great Metric.”
“One thing we try to put across is that data is not this super abstract thing, but actually behind the data is this human story. People doing things for a reason. It’s more like putting on this hat that we already have--thinking from the user perspective, but then going one step further and translating this to metrics and data. Data isn’t merely a new thing--it’s just a dialect. It’s a different expression of what people are doing compared to what designers are used to.”
In one instance, Henrik and his team decided to do a deep dive into having customers’ savings rates as a metric for success. Customers of N26 can set a savings goal and research was conducted to see whether or not they were able to meet their goals, especially if they were connected to a specific deadline to this savings goal. This goes well beyond the typical measurement of Net Promoter Score and zeroes in on a metric that benefits the everyday lives of customers instead of primarily the business needs.
Another example of how they’ve created a metric that has satisfied both human and business needs is measuring user clicks to evaluate whether or not their newly-revamped Information Architecture helps users find the Support Center article they’re looking for. Henrik and his team hypothesized that the ideal click path would be 3-4 clicks to go to the correct article that matches their query. The fewer clicks that are required of customers to find what they’re looking for, the less likely customers are to call N26’s customer service line; thus potentially reducing the cost to serve, hence again serving the needs of both the business and customers.
Henrik says that the hard part with fostering a design culture of data-informed decisions is not creating new processes and tools. It is having the confidence to suggest the changes, finding the right people to talk to and having tenacity to follow through when it gets hard.
“The main thing I took away from the d.MBA was confidence. I became much much more confident when it comes to my business skills. This confidence means that you put it in use, that you feel more empowered and more enabled to take this into your day-to-day because you’re no longer afraid of making a fool of yourself. Confidence goes a long way.”