My Ironhack Journey. Episode 4. Design Thinking Exercise
This is the fourth of a series of articles about my Ironhack journey.
My Ironhack journey. Greetings and Episode 1: Visual Note-Taking
My Ironhack journey. Episode 2: Sketch Visual Design Exercise
My Ironhack journey. Episode 3. Reverse Wireframing
Hello everyone!
I’m back with the second-to-last exercise before we start our UX/UI course at Ironhack. Man I can’t wait.
Let me introduce you our today’s client:
Carol, who is the head of the innovation department in Whole Bank, has done a great job taking it’s bank from the traditional way to operate to a more technological-based way to allow their clients to interact with their finances.
She, along with her team, has spotted an inconvenience for it’s travelling customers as they are tied to their physical cards in an scenario where that may not be an option.
Therefore she wants to implement a smartphone-based payment feature to solve this problem, especially when they are travelling.
In order to develop this feature, we will be going through a process called Design Thinking.
So, let’s start by step one:
Empathize
To understand what’s really going on, we will be interviewing some users to find out what’s going beneath the surface.
As we did so, we found out that most of the people had already switched from a physical-based card to a virtual card. All of those who did preferred to interact using the built in system (aka Apple Pay or Google Pay) instead of using their bank’s own app to make payments in the point of purchase.
This was the first question we asked our users and that answer threw us back to the drawing board as it broke our initial thoughts.
However, after a deep breath, we decided to find out what concerned them about abroad payments to find out what would be our next step. We found out a big answer:
Our users are not comfortable using their cards abroad as they fear having their cards copied.
Yup, that’s it.
Apart from this, we found out that our users don’t like complicated interfaces to deal with money. They don’t want to go through more trouble than they would looking for the wallet and pulling the right card.
Define & Ideate
This one was easy. We just needed to articulate it properly:
Prototype
With all the information in mind, let’s work out our paper prototype:
If you don’t need any more info of how the interaction will be, thanks!
I’ll consider it a good job and you are good to skip the rest of the article and clap a little bit if you feel so inclined!🎉
If not, let me walk you through the feature:
To the already working banking app, we will introduce an action. Our “Pay” action.
After choosing to pay, we emulate the process of going through your wallet’s cards but we introduce a new one that will be only usable once.
The rest of the process is a standard paying process:
Auth ➡️ Hold-card-near-reader-stuff ️➡️ Success!
Test
We did some testing with a couple of our users, showing them the feature and retrieving their thoughts:
- They would have liked it to be incorporated inside their own phone’s wallet.
- They feel it’s not harder to user than their standard virtual cards.
A couple of things I learned from this process are that:
When you ask someone if he have a couple of minutes to exchange thoughts and answer some questions, he or she will look afraid to you. Afraid of finding himself in front of an endless, boring and cold form.
We need to stop doing this!
Besides that, most of the users agreed to the following sentence:
The best user interface is no interface.
Which I find really true. We don’t need to throw an interface to every problem. I’ll try to write an article on this subject soon.
I hope you liked this article! Adiós!
Always remember to credit authors!
- Coins Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/authors/pause08
- Cards Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/authors/ctrlastudio
- Mobile Payment Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/authors/eucalyp
All licences under Creative Commons BY 3.0
