How N26 removes bottlenecks
and makes better decisions with Writer

N26 is a fully licensed digital bank that simplifies daily banking by integrating all financial services within one app. The content design team faced challenges due to limited team size with simultaneous growth in design requests, and needed a way to be able to support other teams without reducing quality of materials produced.

N26 chose Writer as their generative AI solution for their high standards in security, data privacy, and compliance, in addition to fitting seamlessly into their existing workflows. The content design team was able to scale their efforts and get materials to market faster by helping others in product, design, and UX organizations produce consistent, compliant, and on-brand outputs with accessible and inclusive language. N26 content designers can focus more time on strategic discovery and research, resulting in smarter decisions. Since then, legal and marketing teams have adopted Writer to accelerate their asset production.

Tell us about yourself and what you do at N26.

I’m Katie, originally from the UK, but living in sunny Barcelona. I lead the content design team at N26, one of ‌the top digital banks in Europe.

I’ve been working in content for around eight years now, from copywriting to narrative design, and finally specializing in UX for the past five years. I also teach and designed the UX writing course from scratch at allWomen. It’s a fantastic Barcelona-based academy for women that aims to bridge the gender gap in tech. Obviously, I’m passionate about inclusive and accessible design, fascinated by AI, design systems, and the intersection between behavioral science and content design.

N26 is well-known for its simplicity and user-centricity. Eleven years ago, the founders took one look at traditional banking and decided to redesign it completely. Fastforward some years and a few million customers in 24 markets across Europe later, we not only offer an easy way to do your daily banking, but to fulfill all your financial needs within one app. All this designed with real user needs in mind, without the complications, and without the boring paperwork. There’s a group of a few dozen UXers working hard to help users create long-lasting healthy financial habits.

What are some of your team’s top-level goals?

Content design sits within the UX team, and the wider PTX (product, tech, and UX) team. Just like product designers, we create experiences that make managing your money simple, by guiding and delighting users. However, our focus is on language, communication, and information architecture – instead of visual components and UI. We take on tasks that are both high business priority and the biggest content impact. On a daily basis, I team up with other designers, user researchers, and product managers. We also spend a large percentage of our time on foundational tasks such as creating and maintaining our content design system, and finding new ways to make the most out of our fantastic AI tool, Writer.

What led you to pursue generative AI?

At N26, everyone knows just how important content design is. We’ve done the work; we’ve advocated, workshopped, proved our worth with A/B tests, you name it. That’s why we’re fully embedded within project teams instead of jumping in ad-hoc. However, there are more teams that are working on user-facing initiatives than there are content designers. So we can’t be everywhere at once, from start to finish. Ultimately, we needed a simple way to ensure everyone who writes content at N26, does so in a way that’s correct, compliant, consistent, and on-brand. Plus, I made it my personal mission to ensure that our content principles such as the use of accessible and inclusive language were at the core of all N26 experiences. But this was just the beginning.

Why did you choose Writer?

N26 is a fully licensed bank, so security and data privacy were two incredibly important requirements. We take both incredibly seriously and have adequate processes in place to ensure every tool we use to improve our internal processes is risk-free for our employees and customers. The main use case for this AI tool would be to supercharge our user-facing content in both the app and marketing communications. Although this means we don’t use any personal customer information, we still wanted to go the extra mile to ensure total compliance and secure data encryption. After months of competitor research, we decided on Writer as the most holistic solution in these areas.

Beyond security, there was so much more that drew my attention towards Writer. I’m a firm believer that if you want anyone to change their processes, you better bring the tools to the people, and more specifically, where they’re already working.

In previous companies, I’ve seen style guides and design systems fail again and again. Yes, they’re beautifully written with funny little quips and great examples that perfectly demonstrate what you should do against what you most definitely need to avoid. So why was nobody looking at them? If you’ve made a style guide and still get frustrated at the amount of poor content that goes live, I dare you to ask your team how many people have bookmarked the guide; better yet, check out the page analytics.

Designers do not want yet another document with lengthy instructions to abide by. Content considerations should be seen as insights that open up new possibilities and make lives easier, not a set of rules to check your designs against once the fun part is over. Knowing this, it makes sense that when you’re designing, it’s the perfect moment for suggestions and tips to appear. So the challenge was, how do we make our style guide present within the creative, prototyping phase? Writer allowed us to do that with its Figma plug-in.

Once we had a little trial of the tool, we realized that we’d just seen the tip of the opportunity iceberg. If we were able to get licenses for people beyond the UX team, our entire content ecosystem would be skyrocketed into the future.

What are your top uses of Writer?

The main and original use case was to provide Product Designers with the tools they needed to feel empowered to take on the writing themselves, whenever content design support wasn’t available. Writer allowed us to bring our style guide into Figma, where they work, and make use of generative AI in a compliant way.

This also has a secondary benefit, though. That is, if content designers don’t have to take on ad hoc tasks, they can really focus and become truly integrated into teams. This allows them to do the all-important discovery work. For example, if content designers are included at the very start of a project, they can be key strategic partners to User Research, helping to explore the opportunity space with competitor analysis, language benchmarking, and taking part in initial user research interviews. This is key to making informed content decisions later on, as content designers are particularly focused on the way users describe their needs, and can pick up on frequently used terminology and users’ mental models. It also means content designers can lead parts of the product development process, such as problem definition, key messaging, defining narrative arcs, and collaborating with marketing on the holistic content strategy. None of that would be possible if you’re drowning in an infinite amount of low-impact proofreading tasks.

Another big use case for us was streamlining our user research processes. This includes script writing, and analyzing lengthy interview transcripts to extract important insights. By doing this, we can make smarter design decisions. The recaps feature has made all of this so much more efficient.

Now, as we’re eager to do more and more experimentation, we’re excited to explore the Writer Knowledge Graph feature as a searchable test results repository in the near future. Having a database where you can store both UX insights, marketing research, and A/B tests, and use the AI technology behind it to ask specific questions based on that data – that’s a content designer’s dream! It makes speaking directly to your user’s needs, and keeping customers at the heart of everything you do, just that little bit easier.

How did you decide which use cases to start with?

As a content designer, focusing on my area of expertise made the most sense. Once I was able to prove the return on investment for the UX team, it wasn’t long before copywriters, product managers, customer support teams, and many more were keen to try out the tool.

Every time a new team gets licenses, I ask for two things in exchange, a point of contact to reach out to directly, and that they share their wins linked directly to their team metrics on a monthly or quarterly basis. So I can, in turn, use this to make a business case for more licenses in the future.

We designate a point of contact, or Writer champion, for each team, and they’ve been the ones to participate in use case mapping sessions with our amazing Writer customer success manager. Although I onboarded and implemented the tool, there’s no point being the gatekeeper of all its amazing functionalities. Since onboarding teams like Data Analytics and UX Research, we’ve seen Writer be used to enhance operational efficiency, more than I initially expected. For example, a user researcher realized they could use Ask Writer to “be their data analyst and help them to change SQL code” in order to adjust the parameters in the data they were looking into. This is a great support for productivity, as our internal data team are often very busy with bigger topics, and smaller tasks like this could now be outsourced to our trusty AI sidekick, Writer AI.

What was your strategy for AI adoption?

Funnily enough, I inevitably apply content design principles to everything I do. Content design 101 says you should always frontload your content with the customer benefit, i.e. tell users why they should care about the product before going on about how shiny it is. This strategy can also be applied to change management.

First of all, we made sure to align our efforts with the company-wide AI strategy. Then, we took it team by team. If you want people to accept change, or add something new to their roadmaps, you first need to convince them of how it will benefit them in the short or long term. So in rolling out Writer to each team, I first communicated all the relevant use cases that Writer could support for their team specifically, and then told them what they’d need to do to get there. I frontloaded my arguments with customer benefits, if you will.

I also made it easy to access all the information they’d need by creating easy-to-read guides with visual aids and animations, and holding onboardings to smaller groups.

First impressions are important, so I’d sit down with Product Managers, for example, and show them all the features that help with the tasks most relevant to them. Product spends a lot of time creating descriptions and defining OKRs, which they can do more efficiently by prompting Writer.

Another great use case was using the Chrome extension for emails, making internal emails  clear, accessible, and inclusive, or making external emails error-free and professional, in N26’s tone of voice. Last but not least, summarizing tech specs for engineering teams and analyzing launch documentation and release notes with recaps.

There’s so much you can do with Writer, so highlighting these key uses per team from the get-go is key. Of course, once they had a play around on their own, they discovered tons of other ways to make use of the tool. That’s why we have a Google Chat for all Writer users, where we share questions, wins, and cool new ways to use the tool that we can all benefit from. It’s been amazing to see how, although at the start it would be me replying to the questions, over time, some real Writer power-users have surfaced and now mostly beat me to it, or can give insights even I haven’t yet discovered. The tool has been truly democratized, and I love it. Yes, I planted the seed, but Writer and its capabilities are flourishing beyond my wildest human-generated dreams – much like the technology that powers it.