Design Thinking: An exercise
--
What is Design thinking?
A UX designer job could be seen as “the fighter for user needs”. The idea is to make any design a human-centered design. Consequently, the creative process should start with the user and the knowledge and understanding of their needs.
A very interesting methodology used to get to that goal is Design Thinking.
Design Thinking is a process that puts the user first and promotes the generation of ideas using brainstorming, prototyping and testing.
To achieve our goals, Design Thinking suggests five steps:
1. Empathize: As mentioned before, Design Thinking starts with the user. This step is all about getting to know and understand the people that will use our design. A couple of the tools we can use are interviews and observation.
2. Define: This is the moment to delineate the problem at hand, to have a clear understanding of what we’re dealing with. Here we use the previous information and the knowledge gathered in the Empathize step.
3. Ideate: using brainstorming, in this step a lot of ideas are generated to find the most useful and innovative.
4. Prototype: Now is the moment to validate our ideas. Building prototypes helps communicate and examining our ideas to understand its effectiveness and critique the parts that don’t work.
5. Test: Putting concepts in front of the users reveals problems and strengths. The information we gather by testing is very precious to the development of our design.
While using the Design Thinking methodology it’s important to keep in mind that rotating between steps is normal, even desirable. Failing is part of the process and having to go back to a previous step is actually a good sign, we’ve identified a problem and we’re going to fix it.
The exercise
To immerse myself in this method and learn about it, I’ve done an exercise as part of my pre-work for the UX/UI design bootcamp at Ironhack, in which I simulate being hired by a bank to help design a function to let customers pay with their phones while traveling, since they’ve detected that the conventional Credit/Debit System shows big inconveniences for traveling customers. In this case I’m going to work on the four first steps and leave testing for a future exercise.
The company:
Whole bank is a company located in the United States. They’ve been offering innovative options to their customers related with virtual currencies. Now they have detected that the conventional Credit/Debit System shows big inconveniences for traveling customers.
1. Empathize
As part of the empathize step I first tried to respond the following questions to understand the problem better and have a better point of view:
- What problem are you solving? I’m trying to create an easy way for the bank app users to pay when they’re traveling. They can use cards but when using them they can find themselves with these problems: customers may lose their cards, some establishments don’t allow credit/debit card payments and physical cards are susceptible to damage. The feature is meant to be use exclusively when traveling.
- Who is your audience? Customers of Whole Bank. Probably of all ages and demographics. We could venture to assume that people who would use this feature come from a socioeconomic status that allows them to travel enough to require this feature. But we have no data and that assumption could come to the detriment of all the users we could reach. It should be easy enough for novel users but with all the features required for it to work properly.
- Who is your client’s competition? Tech companies like Apple, Google or Samsung have developed apps that deal with payments via smartphone using NFC technology. These companies have already done deals with most important banks in a lot of countries to make their customers able to use them. We have to add that a lot of banks have features like this implemented in their mobile applications.
- What’s the tone/feeling? Serious. This is about money, security, but also travel and expending money. It should be a feature that feels easy, secure, usable and friendly.
Next, I prepared the script I used to interview five people. My goal was to find out what the main pain-points are (what are users having the most trouble with) while using cards to pay while traveling. I tried to make the questions opened and explored the ideas that appeared during the process.
Interview:
- Have you travel recently? Tell me about some of the travels that you remember.
- Did you use your credit/debit cards while traveling?
- What’s the main problem you encounter when using cards while traveling?
Any other problems that you can think of? - Were you able to use them in the majority of the stores?
- Were you able to withdraw money from ATMs?
- When you are traveling, what do you prefer? Cash or cards? Why?
- Do you use your bank mobile application? For what purposes?
- Do you use any mobile application for payments? If you do, what’s your experience with them?
- What would you change about them?
- Would you be interested in a feature to pay with your phone while traveling so you don’t have to use your cards?
- What would you like to see in that feature?
- What would concern you about a feature like this? What troubles do you think you would encounter with it?
2. Define
After interviewing five users, these are some of the problems of using their bank cards to make payments while traveling:
- Carrying the cards around
- Obscure currency exchange
- Obscure or excessive fees for using outside of their country
- Not reflecting the charge immediately
- In some countries the majority of shops and restaurants won’t accept card payments.
- Fees for using ATMs
And this is what I decided was the main problem that I’m trying to solve:
A common concern for the users while using cards when traveling was the currency exchange rate and the fees charged by the bank. They talked about not being sure how much they were paying and what exchange rate was their bank using. Another communality was the firm believe that the future function should be at least as easy as using a real card, if it took more time or thought than taking their wallet from their pocket or purse they didn’t think they would use it.
Most of them preferred to use cards rather than cash, but were concerned about compatibility and problems in some establishments.
4. Ideate
This are some of the ideas I came up with:
- A section of the app, very prominent in the “Home page”, which activates a payment method via NFC. It activates only by pressing a button and it shows the money spend immediately after the payment, any fees, any currency exchange if it applies, and the money you’ve got left in your account or in your maximum use of day and month. The function should be added before the travel so it activates the correct parameters.
- A QR based system that when used by the commerce and the client, provides a way to use these symbols to pay bills. For example, when a shop or a restaurant provides a bill, the system creates a QR that the user can scan and use to pay. The client’s phone would subsequently generate another QR which the commerce can use to verify that the payment was done correctly.
- A case for the phone with a chip and a magnetic band that can be used to pay in establishments. The movements would immediately be reflected in the bank’s app with the information regarding fees, currency exchange and money left open to use.
- A text message system using URLs and codes to make payments. The establishment would have a visible phone number or mail account that would receive the payment and it would be verified in the moment. The establishment would need an active account and the computer or phone necessary to make it work.
After giving it some thought and considering the strength and weakness of each option I decided to develop the idea number 1:
A very easy, straightforward and transparent function that would allow to pay via NFC with just one step. That function would give feedback every time you used it about currency exchange and fees. It would also come with an information section where you could, in one look, know the current exchange rate, the fees that could be applied and the state of the card limit with an option to change it.
This functionality should be activated before traveling giving the information about the country you are going so the app was ready with all the information that applied.
5. Prototype
To finish, here are some of the things I learned throughout the process
I struggled, thinking my design was too boring or too simple. But I decided to settle on it, and this is why:
In a real-life situation, we would be just at the beginning of the process. This is the first low-fidelity prototype, where I’m just communicating the main concept. A first low-fidelity prototype, by definition, should be simple, express the main idea and not dwell on details that would make the designer lose focus or get attached (it’s probably going to change a lot or be discarded).
In following steps, the team would discuss about the design, the possible problems and benefits and we would bring it to the client to have feedback.
