KU School of Art & Design wins both IDEA and Red Dot Design Award

The Shinhan Plus UX design jointly developed by the KU design team and Shinhan Financial Group received the two awards, recognized as among the world’s three most prestigious honors.

▲ Prof. Seung-hun Yoo (left) and researcher Seung-hui Yang (right) at the School of Art & Design

The Shinhan Plus UX design, the unified mobile finance application jointly developed by Shinhan Financial Group and the design lab led by Prof. Seung-hun Yoo from the School of Art and Design, won both the 2019 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) and the 2019 Red Dot Design Award, arguably among the most prestigious honors in the field.

Effective monitoring and managing of finances, including assets, debts, monthly credit card bills, and investment plans, must be one of the toughest tasks for many financial customers. The Shinhan Plus Application, available in service today, translated user insights into a unified, intuitive finance user experience design.

The application, from the planning stage, adopted the convergence approach, which combines a user-friendly UX design and a competitive business model. Once installing the Shinhan Plus App, users no longer need to download different applications of banks and credit card companies for their monthly asset management. With the single solution, they can simply curate distributed information and monitor all their finances in real time. Meanwhile, banks, credit card companies and financial firms have struggled to expand their customer base due to their limited access to information about customers’ activities with other firms. The Shinhan Plus App is a solution that enables customers to access different financial services with a single swipe and thus creates a win-win for both customers and businesses. The intuitive solution is easy to use with technological and legal considerations applied to its design.

For the application design, Prof. Seung-hun Yoo and researcher Seung-hui Yang started with user analysis, interviews and observation. Then, they analyzed Shinhan Financial Group’s big data to understand the functions and information that users frequently access. By prioritizing and effectively arranging these functions and services, they developed the application design. As a result, the app has received positive feedback from existing customers and won 2 million new subscribers since its launch, thus achieving commercial success.

“The integration of user-centered design knowledge and financial big data into our design must have been well received by the world-renowned design awards of the US and Europe as a potential tool to open the door for fin-tech innovation,” said Prof. Yoo, adding, “Our achievements of winning the most prestigious honors over the past seven years have attested to the world-class quality of our curriculum in KU. We will continue to strive to offer our exclusive UX design curriculum to meet functional and emotional needs of customers with a good design.”

The International Design Excellence Award (IDEA), Red Dot Design Award, and iF Design Award are reputed as the world’s three most prestigious design awards, and over 8,000 projects from 60 countries participated in these competitions in 2019. Since 2014, Professor Seung-hun Yoo and his team from KU School of Art and Design have won a series of awards from such world-class design competitions, thus drawing global attention and support.