Challenge
For Credit Suisse’s design team, removing the barriers to creative collaboration and productivity is not only the mechanism that unlocks better problem solving, but can mean the difference between a team’s collective success and failure.
Connecting disparate design teams and functions, while cultivating a safe space for creativity, has been instrumental to the team’s success. For Credit Suisse’s design leaders, empowerment in autonomy is more than words, it’s a foundational philosophy put into practice every day.
“In order to design a solution in a very complex, highly regulated environment means we have to spend a lot of time wrapping our head around definitions, concepts, processes, flows, technical, legal, and governance constraints,” said Christophe Plan, Design Thinking Lead. “The process of understanding this landscape ultimately allows us to develop a birds-eye view of similar problems happening elsewhere in the organization and to rationalize our solutions to address similar use cases. We take more and more a service-design perspective over problem-solving.”
With distance comes the challenges of working autonomously and asynchronously. Credit Suisse’s design team embarked on a journey to foster creativity among its team, empower productivity through autonomy, and leverage InVision’s collaborative toolkit to ultimately build better outcomes.
Solution
With the help of InVision’s collaboration tools, including Prototypes, Freehand, and other features, Credit Suisse has been able to break down silos between design and other departments to streamline communications, speed up design ideation processes to execution workflows, and just as critical, build an environment where creativity can thrive.
Freehand allows us to continually iterate on an idea with others, at our own speed
Amber Agresta
VP, Creative Director, Credit Suisse
InVision’s prototyping tools also created a safe space for thoughtful feedback among its globally distributed designers and non-designers.
“Having visibility into the different prototypes other design teams are working on has been extremely helpful in ideation and avoiding duplication of work. We’re able to work out much more quickly if we’re designing something that has already been solved for,” Amber adds. “We're able to search through the library in our own time, and then start a dialogue with designers in different countries, in different teams, through the commenting features. This has really helped us break down silos within the bank and work more efficiently.”
Results
Breaking down creative barriers
For Credit Suisse, breaking down the asynchronous barriers to creativity has only been a quick brainstorm away.
Lots of impromptu brainstorming sessions to aid working autonomously rather than emailing. Never be afraid to ask a teammate's opinion before coming up with a solution
Amber Agresta
VP, Creative Director, Credit Suisse
Greater visibility
Time is costly, so it's important to ensure that teams are aligned and working on complementary, rather than duplicative projects. Doing this has been transformative to design and development processes.
Being able to create rapid hi-fidelity prototypes in 5 mins has enabled us to go beyond our responsibilities as prior to this we would have been bottlenecked by needing developer resources
Amber Agresta
VP, Creative Director, Credit Suisse
Real-time feedback
The speed to execution is also directly tied to the ability to obtain timely feedback from key stakeholders. Credit Suisse has leveraged the real-time commenting features within InVision’s prototyping and whiteboarding tools to move projects forward around the clock.
“Presenting work in progress to stakeholders based in other time zones through a public link allows work to progress around the clock,” Christophe says.
Presenting work in progress to stakeholders based in other time zones through a public link allows work to progress around the clock
Christophe Pian
Design Thinking Lead, Credit Suisse