How we helped Erste Bank to simplify mobile banking for almost 300k seniors.
It’s a holiday today and I finally found some time to look back a bit at how we created a mobile app for Erste Bank. This app allows people at a senior age to look at their bank accounts. How did the cooperation look like? What’s behind the creative process?
“Josef, we would like to simplify banking for our clients in their senior years. What about a meeting?” — Peter
I met the Peter from the Erste on the competition called Social Impact Award by Impact HUB. We were there attending the contest with an Android launcher Koala Phone that simplifies smartphones for seniors. My answer was: “Well, I want to hear more!” Later at the meeting, I learned that Erste Bank wanted to offer to people in their senior years smartphones equipped with our senior launcher and the new simplified banking app which is the subject of this case study.
I have been designing for 7 years now. One year ago, after the car accident on the racetrack, I began to ask what should I do with my life.
I decided that I want to focus my energy into meaningful projects that really help other people. With this philosophy, we set up the agency, madesense.digital with a core team consisting of three designers and a lawyer. Today we lead a team of 9 talented designers & developers working on mobile apps, websites and brands for London startups as well as for clients such as Mastercard, Marks & Spencer or Orange.
We were invited into this project when it was just an idea. Nice!
It works something like a visit to the doctor. We asked a lot of questions to better understand the needs of the business and its users. We dig deep for the reasons Erste Bank would want to create an application in the first place and how its functionalities should look to provide real value for older people.
20 % of the European population are seniors and 30 % of them have a touchscreen phone.
Erste Bank tested this idea with 200 seniors. The idea was among five other concepts. We were selected and greenlighted to conduct our own research from the product point of view. We were mainly interested in how to adapt the mobile application to the needs of seniors. We created a set of recommendations for designing products for this specific target group. It was important to consider typography, high contrast, and good readability. We found that it was necessary to avoid close colors and to provide enough space for active elements such as buttons. We also identified the need for intuitive navigation in the app.
Thanks to the research outputs we were able to build a strong functional structure for the application.
We divided the target group of seniors into several personas and worked out the ways to easily achieve the desired actions in the application. From a simple list of functionalities, we created a mental map of screens linked to each other. Then we extended the map and created a clickable wireframe prototype for user-testing. This step defined the functionality of the mobile app. Seniors will be able to check their accounts, browse individual transactions, and use the application as a simple communication channel with the bank in the first released version of the app. We have prepared 2 application architectures to test various ways of usage to make sure which way do older people prefer.
Our goal was to express the emotional heart of Erste Bank into the application.
Usually, when we work with the startup, we are in charge of creating the whole brand to express the values of the company and speak to the customers by their language. After that, the visual style of the application comes from the new brand. The company has a strong brand, so our task was to connect together the main pillars of their brand with visuals supporting their values.
This is where the functional structure is combined with the visual style.
This is where strategic thinking is combined with pure creativity. We combined the knowledge from all previous phases to achieve a suitable visual design of all screens in the app. We’ve also designed tailor-made illustrations to make it even easier for older users to use the application.
Our screen design has changed several times during testing, quite radically.
Once we had all the screens ready, we linked them to a clickable prototype. We also prepared a scenario for the testing and invited grandmas and grandpas to join us. Testing took place for 2 days in the room behind the semi-transparent mirror that you know from criminal movies. And what was the result? Our screen design changed several times during testing, quite radically. The size of the font needed to almost double, seniors were not able to see the bottom navigation panel and they did not understand the chart on the main screen. Luckily, today’s technology allows us to iterate test prototypes very quickly, so within two days we were able to tune the design of the application for the real needs of seniors.
After launching the app to the market our goal will be to measure data and implement new modifications & extensions as their long-term partner.
Until now, our coders worked as consultants and approved project decisions from their point of view. Thanks to this approach, the project was agile and went through changes without having to reprogram older code. The native application development itself happened very quickly within a month. The last thing was to connect the application to the open API of Erste Bank and after the test, the app was ready to launch! After launching the app to the market our goal will be to measure data and implement new modifications & extensions as their long-term partner. In future releases, seniors can expect direct payments and a smart advisor to better manage their finances.
Nowadays we are living in a very progressive age. Old concepts are falling away and new ways beginning to work.
New thoughts bring to life projects based on the principles of sharing, helping each other or returning the freedom to people hands no matter if you are a brave startup, or big company with smart vision. Helping companies with fast application prototyping is our mission.
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Josef Slavicek
Co-Founder & Digital Product Designer at Madesense Digital
