Filip Mishevski

ING

Back

Leadership, strategy and hands-on product work across the bank’s mobile and web apps— from the vision for what it should become to the pieces that shipped.

Years
2016 - 2023
Roles
UX Designer, UX Design Lead Payments, UX Design Lead Mobile Banking App
A wall of around thirty panels from four years of work at ING: app and web screens for the shopping cart and the loyalty shop, the Start screen with its widgets, spending insights by category, a knowledge centre, widget families at three sizes, a project timeline, and slides headed Task list, Discover a story, Knowledge Center, Balancing act, Dashboard and Outcome.

Overview

Five strands of work at ING in 7 years: the leadership roles, the strategy behind them, how the design department communicated, the vision projects looking years ahead, and the hands-on product work that shipped.

Underlined are some of my highlights.

Leadership

  • CX board (quality gate)
  • Payments lead
  • Mobile banking lead
  • University mentoring projects

Strategy

  • Banking app global rollout
  • Design department re-organisation
  • Framework for consent for usage of user data

Communication

  • ING Design Blog
  • Design Department Newsletter
  • Payment cards "unboxing"

Vision

Hands-on

Project one

Future of the mobile banking app

Envisioning the next 10 years of Netherland's favorite banking app

The same four Start screens compared: the first led by a campaign illustration, the second by a travel insurance offer, the third by recent transactions and card management, the fourth by an investment account and its return chart.
A dynamic start screen surfacing important information and actions.
A proposal slide: Start is where we elevate what’s important for you. Various widgets combined with top tasks will provide timely and relevant information and actions that cannot be missed. Beside the text, the Start screen itself - Goodmorning Anton, a search bar, round buttons for transfer, payment request and QR code, a For you row with a current account at 315,01 and a savings goal at 600,00, a prompt to activate a credit card in sixty seconds, and recent transactions.
Start, in the deck it was proposed in.
A proposal slide: central to the concept of the Start screen are widgets, snackable and actionable blocks that guide you or give you an insight, personalised and timely. Beside the text, four of them pulled out - this month’s fixed expenses against what is available, a credit card activation task, recent transactions, and a row of suggested products.
The in-app widget idea: snackable blocks, each one either a nudge or an insight.
Four panels explaining the Start screen: the screen itself, the widget concept, daily banking widgets showing balances and recent transactions, and financial health widgets showing a saving streak and a monthly budget.
Details of the Start concept, and two widget categories: daily banking and financial health.
Four more panels: service widgets with a search bar and card activation, sales widgets offering investment and insurance products, a spread of other widgets including loyalty benefits and carbon spend, and a page of layout guidelines for the Start area.
Service and sales widgets, a wider sample of the set, and the guidelines that govern where each one may appear.
A proposal slide: the simple and clean Overview that you know and love, where you find all your ING products, balances and the entrypoints to their details. Beside it, the Overview screen - a current account at 315,01, savings goals for General at 600,00 and Barcelona at 200,00 totalling 800,00, and a credit card below.
Overview, the place where all your balances and products are displayed.
A proposal slide: In and Out is your control center, where the past and future, understanding and action of all income and expenses takes place. Beside it, the screen - transfer and payment request buttons, this month’s fixed expenses against what is available, upcoming debits for Netflix and a worldwide fund, spending categorised into fixed expenses, groceries and shopping, payment requests waiting to be settled, direct debits, and a saving tool.
In & Out: money in, money out, and what is about to leave.
A proposal slide: in Discover the main focus goes towards discovery of all things new - features, knowledge, loyalty benefits and ING products. Beside it, the screen - stories for an app tour, investment myths and savings tips, a list of all banking products from payments to donations, a Homebank plus row, a knowledge centre with an explainer on digital banking scams, and loyalty offers from Starbucks, Nike and Amazon.
Discover: everything new, from features to loyalty benefits.

The challenge

Go beyond the basic banking features and services that ING provides at the moment and go from a transactional app to a relational one. As a result, lift the financial health of our customers to the next level. As a business outcome, create a more engaging app, driving loyalty and open new commercial possibilities.

The outcome

The result was a complete vision for the app, with detailed rationales and principles, validated by research. It re-thinks every current app feature and extends to new directions. The first small slice was released at the end of 2022; the rest went on to fill ING’s roadmap for 2023 and beyond.

Project two

Inga, the chatbot

Exploring what a bank sounds like and what it can do for you 24/7

Eight illustrated portraits of Inga on cream circles: a young woman with a dark side-braid in a blue V-neck top, shown waving, smiling, surprised and speaking, first facing forward and then in profile.
Meet Inga. The AI-powered chatbot that understands your needs.
A systems diagram with Inga at its centre: inputs from ING tribes, branches and chat agents on the left feed a dialogue engine marked NLP and mood detection, which either passes the request to the right channel, answers it, or does it.
How Inga works: from the first contact, all the way to a person when she cannot help.
A board of roughly sixty chat screens in ING orange, purple and green: onboarding cards, card-blocking flows, budget calculations, payment requests, settings and illustrated moments of delight.
The third prototype, screen by screen. From onboarding, to spending reports, all the way to transfers and troubleshooting.

The challenge

Explore the optimal banking conversational experience — and find out whether people were ready for one at all. The goal was better service, not fewer people: a bot is there at any hour, answers the repeating questions, and hands over to an agent the moment it cannot help.

The lessons learned

We talked to a lot of bots first, and found the same four traps in most of them: low error tolerance, where one wrong turn loses the user; lack of trust with anything personal; expectation mismatch, promising a conversation they cannot hold; and cold experiences with no personality at all.

Then we talked to the people who chat with our customers for a living. Their stories of the small, funny exchanges with customers reframed the whole project — not a deflection tool but a way to multiply those moments.

We took the lead from these insights to create a more human-centered approach to chatbot design.

The three prototypes

The first was handcrafted dialogue tested with teens and seniors — jokes, emoji, and some blunt questions about trust and phishing. The second tested whether a bank’s bot could give money advice without sounding condescending. The third went real: natural language understanding behind a custom ING interface, able to block a lost card, settle a payment request, or talk through a budget.

The outcome

Over testing we watched people move from scepticism to delight — and also saw that for some things they will still just call or walk into a branch. So Inga was introduced slowly: presenting search results, and helping customers through their investment calculations.

The full story, with the prototypes and what each one taught us, is on Medium.

Project three

Mobile Banking Sales Uplift

Increasing the commercial possibilities in the ING Mobile Banking App

A slide headed Knowledge Center showing two phone screens: a Discover story about renovations, and a knowledge centre listing financial lessons grouped under Investment and Mortgages, each a row of cards. The text describes a learn, desire, buy approach.
Knowledge Center: learn, desire, buy.
A slide headed Discover a story, showing a full-bleed phone screen of a man slacklining above a valley, with a progress bar of four segments at the top and a card below reading You sometimes do stupid things on holidays, with a Read more button.
Discovery items can open as an article, a product page, or a story.
A slide headed Task list showing two phone screens: one with pension and order cards, the other a task list with a support article about recognising fraud and a list of outgoing payment requests with amounts and expiry times.
The task list, carrying commercial and non-commercial content together.
A slide headed Dashboard showing two overlapping phone screens: a financial health score of 68, spending categorisation for fixed costs and shopping, a pension advertisement, and a dated timeline of account events.
The alternative: a dashboard led by insights, with commercial content between them.
A slide headed Balancing act, with a large orange illustration of a pair of scales weighing two houses. The text argues that customers arrive with a task in mind and should not be interrupted, and that sales tactics must follow the laws and regulations - no dark patterns, good honest advice.
The constraint the rest of the work sits inside.

We explored all possibilities for improvements and extension of the commercial possibilities in the ING Mobile Banking App. Besides the various proposals (placement, visual, conceptual), we also set the tone for the orchestration, optimisation, balance and principles on how to sell, when to sell and what to sell to a client.

Project four

Widgets

Placing your bank on your home screen

Balance widgets at small, medium and large with annotations: variants for one account or two, a combination widget pairing the balance with three or four shortcut buttons, and versions with the information centred, the view more link dropped, and the shortcuts on a grey ground.
Balance, and the combination widget that pairs it with shortcuts.
Transaction widgets at small, medium and large. Categorisation shows one, two or four spending categories with their totals; transactions shows one, two or four payees - bol.com, Spotify, a bike repair shop, the tax office - each with an amount.
Transactions and categorisation, filling out as the widget grows.
Shortcut widgets at small and medium size, in three rows. Transfer suggestions show two or four contacts as coloured initials; payment request shows two or four illustrated categories - dinner, tickets, gift, coffee; app features show two or four purple action buttons for transfer, request, insights and forecasting.
Shortcut widgets: contacts, payment categories and app actions, at two sizes each.
Two iPhone home screens carrying the widgets together - balance and transactions side by side, insights across the full width, and a row of payment request categories - beside a grid of six small and medium variants of the same three widgets.
The family on a home screen, and the variants it is assembled from.

Starting as a UX initiative, we were able to get buy in from our Product and Tech counterparts and launch widgets on day 1 of the Apple’s new OS release. Besides the initial launch, we made sure the widgets can scale and prepared a full widget family / system, covering the main needs of our users - not only balance preview but: shortcuts, transactions, categorisation.

Project five

Insight

Going from a list of transactions to meaning and control

ING internet banking with the Spending insights tab open on a payment account. A Categories panel, 78 percent categorised, lists a month eight ways in a grid - Household 980 euro, Bills and utilities 420, Restaurants and bars 220,50, Groceries 147,12, Shopping 113, Uncategorised 97,50, Transportation 84, Hobby 62,25 - each with an arrow saying whether it rose or fell against the month before. Underneath: spent this month, transferred to other accounts, income, and the monthly balance.
A month split eight ways
One category opened up: a purple header for Restaurants and bars at 220,50 euro with a Set limit button and an illustration of two people at a cafe table, then the transactions that make up the figure, then an Analysis panel - a bar chart comparing January to April and a doughnut splitting the month into coffee at 80 euro and restaurants at 120,50.
Inside one category
The same month and the same categories drawn as a bubble chart instead of a grid: circles sized by what was spent, Household at 980 euro the largest, down to Hobby at 62,25, each with its icon and figure, over the same period chips and running total.
Alternative visualization of the month overview
A proposal slide titled Categorisation Reports. The text explains that highlighting spending in certain categories or locations can illuminate spending patterns, and that with budgets it can give people more control. Under New triggers, two example notifications: a yearly spend report ready for review, and a spending insight asking whether to be harsh or gentle, with Roast me and Take it easy buttons. The tags engagement, financial coach and financial influencer. Beside the text, four phone screens: an Insight report list with cards for a holiday at 1.243,00 and coffee at 112,25 over a Groups breakdown, a monthly coffee report listing twelve Starbucks transactions, a year in review headed What a year huh, and a fourth comparing spend against the Dutch average.
From data to insights in the form or reports

I pitched and managed to get buy in for bringing one of the most requested features live - Cost Categorisation (Insight). Starting with a deep discovery work, all the way to prototyping, validation and even categorisation model design, I designed the foundations for what’s now the Insight tab in the ING app and website.

Project six

Loyalty shop

Making loyalty tangible (and shoppable)

The Rentepuntenwinkel home page: a blue Ray-Ban Wayfarer hero at 109,95 euro plus 2.500 points, promotional panels for seasonal offers and best sellers, a category list down the left, and a Fresh offers row with an Efteling family ticket and an Apple Watch.
The shop front: one hero, two promotions, and a row of fresh offers.
The Kleding category in grid view, eight product cards of polo shirts and shirts, each with a photograph, name, struck-through original price, the points price, and an Add button on the card being hovered.
Category in grid view. Price and points sit together on every card.
The same Kleding category in list view: each product on a full-width row with its photograph, star rating, description, available colours and sizes, price and points, and an Add button.
The same products as a list, with ratings, sizes and colours visible without opening anything.
The filter panel open over the category: checkboxes for product types with counts, size and colour swatches, a price slider from nought to 500 euro, a points slider from 1.000 to 300.000, and a filter by my points checkbox.
Filtering by the usual things, and by the points you actually have.
The product page for the GANT Sunbleached polo shirt: colour and size pickers, quantity, the price with points beneath it, free delivery and returns, a comparison of prices at Bol.com, FonQ and Coolblue, a description tab, and a row of suggestions.
The product page, with what the same item costs at three other shops.
The shopping cart with two items - a polo shirt and four theatre tickets - each with its own options, and an order summary totalling 180,75 euro plus 13.700 points, with a Buy now button.
Checkout: one basket, money and points side by side.

We addressed all identified pain points and did a complete redesign on ING’s Loyalty Store (Rentepuntewinkel). Following a sprint approach (all while bringing stakeholders along the ride), we managed to handover validated designs for the entire shop in 2 months. The result is still live and is serving as one of the main loyalty benefits for ING clients.

More work