Panorama: When Self-Service Worked Too Well

Danske Bank wanted a competitive differentiator: a feature that would let customers see a full picture of their financial health inside the banking app, then convert that clarity into something the bank actually needed — more customers booking a meeting with a financial adviser. The working name was Panorama: six topics (financial buffer, insurance, debt, home equity, long-term savings, future finances), each evaluated and given a status, rolling up into one overview.

The premise going in seemed straightforward: show people where they stand, and they'll want to talk to someone about what to do next. That premise turned out to be the thing worth testing hardest.

The first hypotheses were about legibility, not motivation: would color-coded status indicators read clearly, and would people understand a circular layout of six topics as one connected evaluation rather than six separate features to poke at.

Round one testing said no on both counts. The circular layout pulled attention away from the results themselves — participants said it "took up too much space" and wanted to get to the list below it faster. Blue and green were read as reassurance rather than status ("that's fine, I don't need to look further," one participant said, and left the flow). And the copy was actively working against the goal: "Activate your Panorama indicators" told people they were choosing which modular features to turn on, not completing one holistic assessment. The section headline implied a to-do list, not an evaluation.

The fixes were direct: drop the circle for a list, rewrite "activate indicators" to "activate Panorama" so the whole assessment reads as one action, move the CTA closer to the topics people were actually meant to act on, and add an upfront introduction explaining what Panorama is before asking anyone to do anything with it. [note: exact participant count and testing method — moderated remote/in-person, how many sessions — worth adding if you have it, since specifics like "we tested with 12 participants" land better than a general reference to "testing."]

A second round of testing — this time validating the fixed self-service flow — answered the legibility question cleanly. People understood the topics, trusted the chart enough to want to see their actual position against a recommendation, and appreciated a clear read on where their finances stood.

What it also revealed was a problem nobody had designed for: the better the self-service experience got, the less reason people felt to book a meeting with an adviser. Customers liked being able to explore their own data. Being able to do that on their own was, in itself, satisfying enough that it undercut the motivation to take the next step the whole feature existed to drive. The extended self-service functionality was working against the objective it was built to serve.

That is not a bug you fix with better copy on a button. It is a contradiction sitting inside the feature's own value proposition: the more useful Panorama was as a self-service tool, the more it competed with the business outcome it was supposed to produce.

The response was to stop treating the adviser meeting as a generic next step tacked onto the end of the flow, and start designing specific moments where self-service visibly runs out of road. The pension-gap messaging is a good example of the shift in approach: rather than a blanket "book a meeting" prompt, the copy names a real, non-trivial gap ("state pension alone typically covers only 40–60% of your final salary") and positions the adviser as the one who can do something self-service explicitly cannot ("your advisor can model this precisely for your situation"). The value proposition changed from "talk to someone about your results" to "here is the specific thing only a person can help you with now that you've seen your results."

The team also set an explicit bar for what success would look like at this stage — informally framed as roughly 30 out of 100 visitors converting to a booked meeting — so the redesign has a number to be judged against once it ships, not just a direction that felt right.

[note: as of this write-up the MVP is scoped for an October 2026 launch — worth updating this section with the real conversion numbers once you have them post-launch, since a validated result here would be the strongest closing beat of the whole story.]

Panorama moved from "will people understand this" to "does understanding create the right behavior" — a harder, more interesting question, and one that would have been easy to miss if testing had stopped after the first round looked successful. The redesigned adviser touchpoints are built and scoped for the October MVP; the real test is whether they close the gap that self-service opened.