Dealing with money is HARD. I do not want my fun exotic trip to turn me into a financial banker, but, exchange rates, overseas transactions, currency fluctuations… seem to come as a package deal with travelling. What’s worse is that as a ‘serial-card-loser’, I live in constant fear of ending up as one of the less fortunate Tom Hanks characters.
The challenge
So when I saw my next UI-UX exercise, I related completely. We were to design a mobile banking app for ‘Whole Bank’, based out of the United states. The app is meant to step in as a replacement for physical cards, facilitating bank transactions and payments in store through the virtual card in the app. This is especially convenient, consider the chances of the physical card wearing out, or being lost or stolen. The prototype design encourages us to refer to the 5 principles of the design thinking approach:
Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test
I suspected that I may infact have been empathizing a bit too much, so I tried to take a step back and disassociate myself before I stepped into the interview part.
Empathize
Identifying interviewees was not very hard, considering that a significant portion of my friends are students who have moved to Europe to study. They were the ideal target group of a virtual card such as this; a younger demographic that was open to non- traditional banking methods, avid travelers and keen on saving any money that can be saved.
The coursework gives us some pointers on the right methodology to conduct interviews. It emphasizes on asking open ended questions, and smoothly transitioning from one topic to other. One of the most important takeaways was to ask questions on how the user ‘feels’. Allowing the interviewee to articulate his/her emotions gives far clearer conclusions than forming our own interpretations of their feelings.
Through my question, I tried to understand the background of the users and the scope of the card :
- What is the primary source of money during their travel? Are they from personal earnings, or provided by family?
- Is there a concern regarding the card being stolen? Under what circumstances have they felt this way?
- Where have they traveled so far and what are their future travel plans?
- How concerned are they about saving money on over seas transactions?
- Is there a back-up plan in case their wallet or phone got stolen?
- How receptive are they to the idea of using a virtual card?
- Are they solo travelers, group travelers, or prefer packaged travel deals?
- How soon would they begin planning for the fiances of the trip, and what would be the main concern about using cards abroad?
- How comfortable are you with navigating through your banking websites and mobile apps?
I also tried to look at their familiarity with the main competitors, i.e applepay, googlepay and samsung pay. I asked them about their experiences with these products, but it was clear that this is was not a widespread phenomenon.
Define: Pain points
- Banking is scary! One of the main inputs I got from everyone I interviewed was that they were apprehensive of navigating through banking websites. Most of these banking websites and apps tend to have an information overload and give no clear orientation during a transaction.
- There is a high chance of being stranded somewhere with no money. Alternatives and back-ups are good
- Carrying large amounts of cash is not ideal
- There are always hidden charges and the bank is never upfront about it
- Conversion rates are hard to calculate on the spot
- Hard to keep a close eye on the spending as banks usually send through only monthly statements
Ideate
- My prime goal was to make the navigation and available information as simple as possible. How will you get from point A to point B in the least number of steps? What information can be eliminated? Any information other than the necessary can be found on the personal banking webpage.
- All transactions had to be transparent, the app will show the total charges in both currencies before making the conversion
- After doing a fair bit of research on mobile payments, I decided to stick with enabling only NFC payments, as they were quite adaptable to existing contact-less machines
- The credit card would work as a top-up card, which will give the user a sense of greater control over the transactions and spending
Prototype
In the end, I tried not to reinvent the wheel and incorporated similar payment processes as those of applepay and samsungpay, something the users may be familiar with. The wire flows are simplified to include only the most basic components, and this is possible since it will directly tied to the baking account. This eliminated several steps and also allowed the card top-ups to be made in different currencies. The amount of money available in each currency is shown in friendly bold letters on the landing page.
All things considered, someone should definitely get a move on and start building and popularizing one of these apps. I for one cannot wait for the chance to be finally free of my little plastic card.
