An off-brand testing environment
Aditium
In today's fast-changing business world, trying out new ideas is key to staying ahead. ABN AMRO has created Aditium, an off-brand testing environment for new business ideas. Unlike using the ABN AMRO brand, Aditium enables teams to experiment without worrying about brand influence, biases, or hurting the company's reputation. This makes it a safe space for innovation initiatives to test bold and new ideas. Aditium helps speed up the creation of innovative solutions and increases the speed of experimentation.
Role: Product Designer, Product owner
Focus: UX design, UI design, Interaction Design, UX research, Prototyping, Usability testing, Project Management, Stakeholder management, Web Content Creation
The problem
I have encountered several significant challenges that hinder the effective testing of new business ideas. The main problem is that experimenting through the bank’s general channels often takes an excessive amount of time, delaying the potential benefits and insights that could be gained from these initiatives. The influence of the ABN AMRO brand biases users, leading to less reliable research outcomes and not fully reflective of the market's true response.
In the past, considerable risks have been experienced when testing bold ideas directly under the ABN AMRO label, potentially compromising the reputation and stakeholder trust. These issues emphasized the need for a dedicated, off-brand testing environment to facilitate faster, unbiased, and safer experimentation.
Challenges and mitigating risks
Creating such a solution came with challenges as it was completely new to the bank to develop an off-brand testing environment.
One of the main challenges was to map out and mitigate the potential risks to make sure the product was compliant with regulatory requirements and high standards of operational integrity.
How might we
How might we, as Strategy & Innovation, be able to test new innovative and bold ideas without user bias, brand influence and a high change of reputational risks?
Exploring the future of finance through rapid experimentation
Aditium is a research enabler that has transformed the way ABN AMRO’s innovation department approaches experimentation. Through rapid experimentation, ideas are validated efficiently. It provides valuable insights into user behavior. Detailed landing pages with integrated surveys gather quantitative data directly from target audiences.
Setting up innovation cases
Aditium is created in a template based content management system, which makes it very easy for project teams to create their own “case” page on which they present their proposition and test their innovative ideas. Working with seperate cases makes enables us to separate and run multiple experiments at once, keeping the research clean and efficient.
Final thoughts
Reflecting on this process for developing Aditium at ABN AMRO, I can confidently say it was a journey filled with both challenges and invaluable learning experiences. The complexity of the task presented numerous obstacles, yet it also offered me a unique opportunity to develop a wide range of skills.
The necessity to communicate effectively with multiple channels required me to refine my ability to present information clearly, negotiate, and build consensus among diverse groups. While this aspect of the process was not always enjoyable, it was crucial to achieve my goal: successfully implementing off-brand testing through Aditium within ABN AMRO.