Paying abroad with Whole Bank App
Design Thinking Exercise for Ironhack Bootcamp Prework
WHOLE BANK, Framingham, Massachusets, USA
Whole bank is a modern bank looking for innovative answers to their difficulties. Open to technological solutions, they already have an application that permit clients to manage their money online and use virtual currencies.
Today they need to improve their clients’ experience abroad. Travellers may face inconveniences with the actual conventional credit/debit system by card. The bank would like to offer them the opportunity to use their mobile device to pay while travelling.
The exercise here is to find out the main problems of paying abroad and try to find solutions to apply to the new feature.
Design Thinking for a payment App

1. Emphathize
Personal Introspection
What is the problem ? To create a new feature for a mobile bank app already existing. It will permit to pay abroad with a mobile device. The challenge here will be to keep the pros while eluding the cons of the payment by card. The public is made of travelling clients of Whole Bank. The app will have to compete with other banks app offering this possibility, the main ones being : Paylib, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, BAM. It has to be innovative, efficient and user friendly.
Interviews
Knowing the user and its needs is primordial to a good design thinking process. To do so, interviews are a good way to question people’s way of interacting with their environment. Here are the different questions I asked to friends, which are regular travellers :
Travelling / Paying Abroad : Are you used to travel? How often? For work or holidays? What activities abroad? How do you pay there? Do you encounter some difficulties?
Use of technology : Do you have a smartphone ? Do you use it abroad ? Do you use your bank app ? Would you pay with it in shops ? and abroad ?
Manon : The main difficulty for me are the taxes
Tanguy : I’m not sure I will use it, I like to know how much I spend. While travelling you can easily lose the count and the dematerialization doesn’t help.
Marthe : I would definitely use that kind of app. I always have problems with my card abroad
Interviewing people, and especially relatives, is not an easy task. What is difficult is to find out the right questions to ask, the ones that will open the discussion and let you dive in the life of the interviewees. I really liked watching and listening the debate it initiated among my friends.
2. Define
Defining the problem is an important stage of the design thinking, it’s all about bringing some clarity to the data collected during the interview. The results show that there are several painpoints amidst which : to know where people could use the app. But this could be easily resolved by a map with the different shops’ location accepting the app. Here is for me the main problem to solve : the defiance over using the mobile device to pay, and particularly abroad. People seem emotionally attached to the card payment.
3. Ideate
The problem identified, comes the time of the solutions creation. To gain the affection of the customers the new payment feature should present a real added value compared to the card payment.
Propositions :
- fees problems : exposing the exchange rate at the moment to pay and offering the choice of paying in different currencies, even in crypto money, to avoid the fees
- material nostalgia : insisting on the physical aspects of the card with the design of the app and also offering to keep a track of the expenses during the travel
4. Prototype
Protoyping requires training…


This was a very quick prototyping process, I’m not really satisfied about it… It was harder than expected to communicate what I had in my mind by sketching. But again I’m looking forward to be more effective at it.
The testing part has been skipped for this exercise, but it looks exciting to test and improve the propositions. Finding and developing a device that the user wants to use and has the best experience with might be tricky but it looks like a great experience to do.
It is always the point with numerisation, finding the way to upgrade a feature, and not only using it as a gadget, something that will really improve the experience of navigation for the user.
Can’t wait to learn all of this at the bootcamp.
