1st Design thinking exercise: Whole Bank app

Sandy Lu
Sandy Lu
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Question

Whole Bank wants to create a function in their existed app to allow their customers can make a payment abroad without carrying a physical credit/debit card.

Interviews

I interviewed 5 people from USA, Ireland, and Taiwan. They all travel at least twice a year abroad. The ages are 27+.

The questions I asked are

Do you travel? How often do you travel a year?

When you are traveling, what kind of payment method do you prefer, cash or cards?

Have you ever experienced any issues while using the cards aboard?

The main concerns I found are

  1. American credit/debit cards don’t have chip and pin function, so travelers can’t use contactless nor purchase via vending machines in Europe. They have to swipe the card and sign, and the process takes long time and annoying.
  2. Credit/Debit cards get denied or fail.
  3. Credit/Debit cards get stolen or lost in foreign countries and it takes a long time to have the new one delivered. The bank may charge a lot for replacing and delivering.
  4. Credit/Debit cards not commonly use in certain countries.
  5. Some countries prefer VISA, while some prefer Master.

Targeted issues

I notice that people find it is very annoying when they need to swipe card and sign because it may take up to 3 minutes (sometimes it is even longer). Also, without the PIN function, people can’t use vending machines to buy train and metro tickets or even just pay for parking. Cards get denied or not authorized often caught people out of guard as well.

Solutions

Concerning above points, I think the best solution is to create digital wallet function in Whole bank app. So people can go everywhere without carrying a physical card as everything is stored in the app already.

CARDS: customers can save multiple cards in advance, so if one card doesn’t work, they can switch to another one. This also gives the benefit for not carrying so many physical cards at the same time.

QR CODE: if the store only accept VISA, but customers only have Master, they can use QR CODE instead. Just show the QR CODE to the store to scan, and it is done.

OFFLINE: if customers don’t have internet access while traveling, they can still make a payment by entering the four digital pin. Or when customers are at the vending machine and need to enter pin, they can find it here as well.

Prototype

Afterthought

I found interviewing and listening to people are interesting. You can hear some opinions that I would have never ever thought of before. For example, because the credit card I am using has a chip, pin and contactless function, it was until I interviewed some travelers from USA then I realize that this can be an issue.

After interviewing, even though I already had some key points that I wanted to solve, but I still didn’t know where to start. I draw some customer map, but still not organized and didn’t seem right. So I went online and looked into some digital wallet apps in the market. It was at that time I had more and more clear idea about how to put everything together.

Sandy Lu

Written by

Sandy Lu

UI/UX designer in Barcelona, Spain. My Dribbble: https://dribbble.com/sandylu

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