How Coventry Building Society democratised research across a team serving 2 million members

Introduction

Coventry Building Society has been around long enough to have seen banking change shape more than once. Founded in 1884, the mutual now serves around 2 million customers across savings and mortgages, with a reputation built not on gimmicks or novelty, but on trust, clarity, and long-term value. As one of the UK’s largest building societies, and the first to become B Corp certified, it occupies a distinctive position: an institution with deep roots, but a growing digital surface area.

That surface matters more than ever. For many customers, the brand is no longer experienced first in a branch or over the phone, but in an app, an onboarding flow, a savings journey, or a mortgage interaction that has to work instantly and intuitively. Inside CBS, those experiences are shaped by the Chief Information and Digital Office, where the UX UI team works across core digital journeys spanning savings, mortgages, and selected colleague-facing experiences.

The team itself is relatively lean: a group of designers and specialists working in a T-shaped model, without dedicated researchers embedded in the function. Which meant that if user research was going to meaningfully shape product decisions, it could not sit at the edge of delivery. It had to move closer to the work itself.

We spoke to Jessica Owen, UX UI Designer at Coventry Building Society, about how Ballpark helped make that shift possible.

“The main reason that Ballpark stood out to us was its ease of use, compared to others that we've had demos for, Ballpark was an outlier in that perspective.”

Closing the gap between intent and execution

For CBS, the challenge was not whether research mattered. It was how to make it work at the speed product teams needed. The User Experience and Interface function already operated within a lean UX and design thinking model, but like many in-house teams, it faced a familiar tension: the desire to validate decisions properly, and the reality of delivery timelines that rarely leave room for slow or specialist-heavy research cycles.

As Owen explains, that challenge was made more acute by the structure of the team itself. Research was not owned by a separate function. It was shared across designers, alongside the rest of their responsibilities. So any tool the team adopted had to do more than offer research capability. It had to make research practical: easy to set up, easy to repeat, and easy to build into the rhythm of day-to-day product work. Just as importantly, it had to help the team reach participants who genuinely reflected the people they were designing for.

“Ballpark has been a game changer for us in all honesty. Having the ability to complete rapid iterative testing has made us as a team more efficient, and we’re much more thorough now with our research and testing.”

From occasional testing to everyday practice

Ballpark gave CBS a way to make research feel less like a formal checkpoint and more like part of the design process itself. Owen describes a workflow built around rapid, unmoderated studies across surveys, usability tests, and card sorting, often blending qualitative and quantitative feedback in the same piece of work. The point was not simply to produce evidence, but to generate momentum: to test ideas earlier, learn faster, and keep decisions moving without losing touch with real users.

That mattered not only operationally, but culturally. Because the platform was intuitive enough for a team of designers to use without friction, research became easier to distribute across the function. Designers could test more often, stakeholders could see clearer evidence, and the output of research could travel further across the business. In Owen’s account, Ballpark was not just helping CBS run studies. It was helping the team build a more mature research practice through repeated use, shared learning, and stronger confidence in the decisions that followed.

“Ballpark has been a game changer for us in all honesty. Having the ability to complete rapid iterative testing has made us as a team more efficient, and we’re much more thorough now with our research and testing.”

Turning evidence into momentum

One of the clearest examples came through CBS’s mobile onboarding journey, which allows new customers to open a savings account in the app from start to finish. After launch, the team noticed an increase in duplicate profiles being created during onboarding. Internal data suggested that users were becoming confused at a specific point in the flow, but the data alone could not explain what was driving that behaviour.

Owen points to Ballpark as the tool that helped the team move from suspicion to clarity. By testing the journey directly with users, CBS uncovered something subtle but important: the problem was not just the flow itself, but the language inside it. A key screen used internal CBS terminology that made sense within the business, but not necessarily to the people moving through the experience. By observing users, hearing them think aloud, and then iterating and retesting the wording, the team was able to improve clarity, confidence, and the likelihood that users followed the correct path. It was a small but telling example of what happens when research is close enough to the work to catch the things analytics alone often cannot.

More broadly, Ballpark has helped CBS increase both the volume of testing it conducts and the confidence behind it. What began as a way to make research more accessible for a lean design team has become part of how that team works, decides, and builds. In an organisation where trust matters, that shift is significant: not because it makes research louder, but because it makes it more routine.

“The support has been second to none, honestly. Every colleague in Ballpark that we’ve worked with in the last 15 months has been helpful, supportive, and has 100% enhanced our knowledge and confidence with research as well.”