Case study: Design thinking exercise

A beginner’s approach to design thinking.

Whole Bank is a fictional bank that wants to become more technological and user-friendly. They want to offer an alternative to credit/debit card systems for people who travel, so that their clients might choose other options to physcal cards that might get lost, stolen, damaged, or not accepted at some places.

Whole Bank customers already have access to an application where they can have all their financial information stored and make a series of opperations. The task is to create a new feature on this application that would allow customers to pay for things using the mobile app.

Process

Since I am on a rush with the course pre-work, I squeezed all of this into one day of work.

Interviews

After rushing over some questions and ideas, I decided to take an approach on the different situations in which people travel, with the objective to takle the specific problems or concerns associated. More specifically: couples, solo travelers, families and people who travel for work. I selected 5 persons from my environment with different backgrounds and ages.

Following a design thinking workshop I made a year ago, I asked a lot of “Why’s”. I realized it’s really hard to guide people to give you the answers you are looking for.

Over the interviews, I detected that most of the concerns were common to every group:

• Lack of trust towards mobile paying applications against the trust and convenience of credit cards. People are used to it.
• Safety issues.
• Difficulties when finding ATM’s, or having to share expenses/ask a friend for money because there is no ATM available.
• Information. People want to know what they are paying, the currency change, commission fees, etc.

Additionally, people who travel for work and need to justify their expenses — as well as crazy people like me who want to know exactly how much they are spending during a trip.

Main problem to solve

I wanted to focus on offering clients a mobile payment method that would be as easy, trustable and convenient to use as a credit card, while having additional features to put at ease their main concerns when traveling, so that users can focus on enjoying the trip.

*convenient = fast to use, no need to push a lot of buttons, preferably no need for wifi

How did I plan on solving this problem

I started sketching, summarizing, mapping and going back and forth through the things that I wanted from the app. In the end I just picked a solution and sketched to show the way I wanted the app to perform. I didn’t spend too much time on this step.

The app had to work in many situations: windows, ATM’s, restaurants…

I focused on an ideal interaction between the app and the store/trade, where every store could just send the payment information to the phone by proximity, triggering the launch of the application to show the payment information.

When interacting with a store or trade, the vendor should be able to send the payment info to the user’s phone directly from their dataphone, so that the app can interact with any merchant that supports credit cards, and be assured that the payment has been made succesfully.

Could it be possible to divide a payment between friends directly during the payment? The app would detect other phones by proximity and ask if you want to share expenses. In this case, everybody should probably need to have the same app installed. *crazy idea*

Main flows for payment and shared payment. Some additional features on the left.

Anyway, I tried to sketch roughly how the interaction would work. The payment info would appear directly on the phone without the need of opening the app (ideally), with info about price, merchant and address, currency change (if applicable), and symbols indicating the transaction is safe, possible and whether it’s free of commissions or not. Swipe for credentials, payment accepted, merchant receives confirmation. That’s it! Other options include checking a map of ATM’s, checking and organizing your receipts and sharing them to your email (for work trips), editing or changing the credit card (although this info is on the main app), and access to some monetary tips about the country you are traveling to. Magic.

Please notice that feasability was not taken into consideration for this exercise.

Conclusions

If I had to take something from this exercise, would be user interviews. I learned that making the right questions is vital to the final product, because you are taking them as a basis for the ideation process.