Chris Thelwell
Case studies

Bringing to life ‘what if’ – Barclays Cloud It


What if the customer could walk into a branch with a wheel barrow full of their most important document, drop them into a box, then view them securely online? A crazy idea generated in the lift between Barclays CEO and COO. We were invited to try and bring this concept to life and present back and idea for a concept.


Cloud It

Cloud It

It’s been done before, creating a real differentiator

Online cloud storage is all around us, with some very successful market leaders such as DropBox, Google Drive and Evernote. We needed to create something a little different. Something need to be added to the securely stored documents to make them better than those stored in other cloud solutions. The answer was to use the unfair advantage of the bank itself. As a secure and trusted institution the bank could we authenticate all documents to make them as trusted and real as the original documents? The concept of the ‘digital original’ was born.


Cloud It

Bringing to life the stories behind the idea

My team started work by brainstorming the scenarios to demonstrate the future vision of the ‘digital original’. A set of simple storyboards were created to demonstrate the idea and highlight the potential benefits and establish the features required.


Cloud It Cloud It Cloud It

Rapid wire framing to define the solution

The idea was still quite hot within the leadership of Barclays, so we needed to move fast and turn these ideas into a real deliverable product as quickly as possible. Over the next two weeks we used a rapid wireframe technique to shape the end product using a Kanban system to establish priorities, features and manage each days workload to ensure the small team could produce the big result needed.


Cloud It

Developing prototypes for early user testing

Alongside the rapid wire framing, the design team developed a visual look and feel following the Barclays style guide, and quickly developed a visual prototype to test with real users. The results were successfully delivered to the leadership of Barclays and funding was secured to take the concept to market.


Cloud It

The product inception through to build and launch

The wire frames and designs where refined over the following month to define the MVP and the product backlog, including a new look and feel to position the product as a showcase for Barclays innovation. Barclays Cloud It was then built using Barclays internal development teams and successfully launched in Q3 of 2013.


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