Ironhack Prework — Design Thinking Exercise

Whole Bank is an American bank which wants to offer a different money management method for your costumers by offering innovative options. They detected some inconveniences that the conventional Credit/Debit System presents for traveling customers, mainly because they depend on the card to make payments or to get money from ATMs. This dependence on the card can bring enormous problems in some situations, such as when the card is lost or damaged when the customer is traveling. Because of this, they want a new solution but using their pre-existent app.

Solving the Problem

1. Empathize

To create empathy with the customers, I had to do some interviews to get to know the theoretical user profile for this new function on the Whole Bank app.

I interviewed 5 individuals between 24 and 57 years old and which are frequent travelers, manly traveling around Europe, South America or the USA. During this process I discovery three main points:

• Most of the interviewed don’t use applications to pay cause doesn’t understand how it works.
• They prefer to pay with money but liked the option of payment with credit/debit card so you don’t have to travel with a lot of paper money in hand.
• They worried about the internet connection in cases of pay with the mobile.

It’s also important to notice that in those regions where my typical user travels around, the payment by contactless is a reality in the biggest cities.

2. Define

After the results of the interviews, I could define the main problem that I want to solve, and it is:

• Create functionality to pay with smartphones;
• Make it easy to navigate and utilize;
• Make it work offline.

3. Ideate

To create a solution I had to search a little bit about the possible payment options with a smartphone. Initially, I drew a mind map to choose the best one.

In this case, analyzing the possibilities, I found out that the NFC (near field communication) mode was the best option. Nowadays, the biggest part of card payment terminals already has a built-in option of contactless payment, and the user don’t have to be connected to the internet to work.

Payment Terminal

4. Prototype

I decided to create a new section in the app, where you can have access to your pre-saved card on your phone, like a wallet. The main idea is that even offline, the user would still be allowed to access their card and make payments, so they do not have to worry about the internet connection.

The access to travel mode will be by the menu on left.

*The “Travel Mode” will show the payment amount converted to the currency that the user chooses.

After the payment, the user can also see the account balance and resume of expenses.

Few key things that I learned throughout this process.

• Interviewing as if it were a casual conversation helps you to get more insights from the user. However, it’s great to have a prepared questionnaire because it’s easier to focus on the important topics.
• Interviews are very important so that we don’t create features based only on our own experiences.
• On some trips, you can’t escape from paper money, so it’s always good to have some in your wallet.
• The Design Thinking processes is a great guide and already have a piece of my heart.