Design Thinking For Whole Bank
An exercise on design thinking for a mobile banking app.
THE BACKGROUND:
We have been hired by Whole Bank, MA — to help them improve their customers’ experience of the bank’s new mobile app. Our reference person is Carol Holmes, Head of the Innovation Department.
She is specifically looking to tackle the following issue: to give customers who travel often abroad an alternative to debit/credit cards payments through their mobile app.
The task is, therefore, to implement a feature on the mobile app to use specifically for payments when traveling abroad.
To find a solution we followed a four steps process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype.
STEP 1: EMPATHIZE
To connect with users we interviewed people who have experiences with traveling abroad to understand the issues they face. The questions which guided the conversation were:
- What is your general money experience when traveling?
- How do you usually exchange money?
- How do you pay for things when abroad?
- Can you think of issues you have faced in the past?
Paco, 31 says: “Sometimes the fees for payments and withdrawals are ridiculous”
Vincenzo, 32: “I always try to use a card, but I wouldn’t buy a 1€ coffee with it … you spend more time digiting the pin”
STEP 2: DEFINE
After extensive research, and delving deeper into those questions, we came up with the following related pain points:
- Knowing the value of things in a foreign currency.
- Using a credit card for small payments feels “weird”.
- When traveling for work, keeping a bunch of receipts organized for later reimbursement.
- Fees for cash ATM withdrawals.
- Locating an ATM when needed.
STEP 3: IDEATE
For this specific case, we will focus on giving the customers the quickest access to a payment tool
STEP 4: PROTOTYPE
Let’s go ahead with some wireframes, shall we?
We have added a quick-pay option before login, so users can pay quickly before accessing the app. They can set budget limitations for the amount of the quick-pay transaction, and can also set the currency displayed when buying something.
CONCLUSIONS
With this exercise I have learned two things:
- It’s definitely better to START WORKING on something even without a crystal-clear idea of what the outcome should look like. The act of starting to work on something provides new ideas. Which also teaches me another thing: don’t overthink it! Just try something instead.
- When something is unclear, ASK! Ask your clients, ask your managers, ask your colleagues. If this was a real-life scenario, I could have spent hours trying to understand what I was actually supposed to do by asking our reference person: Carol Holmes.
