A Redesign Opay’s Dashboard -A UI/UX Case study

Emerame Happy
5 min readNov 14, 2023

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OVERVIEW

Opay is a very popular financial wallet app that has made banking at the grassroot level easy for Nigerians. With just your phone number you can operate all forms of banking transactions from free transfers to cashback on airtime and data tops-ups. Banking has never been this seemless.

The phone number to account number poses an issue though; not being able to control who is able to contact you especially as your phone number doubles as your Opay account number. Although the Virtual account number solves this issue but a number of Opay users aren’t aware of the feature and those who got the virtual account number at the point of opening an account don’t know there is a Vitual Account dashboard with lots of beautiful features they can use for personal purpose and for their business.

So this case study is meant to redesign the Opay’s General dashboard for easy access to the virtual account dashboard.

Expected Outcome: A redesign of the Opay’s dashboard for easy access to the virtual account dashboard.
My role: Product designer
Tools used: Figma, Figjam, Google Doc and Telegram

Problem statement

Sometime ago, my spouse received money from a commercial bank with his Opay’s virtual account number, but he was not able to see the details of the sender until he downloaded his statement of account. That was really stressful for him as he had to keep downloading his statement of account to see a sender’s details. I got interested and kept wondering why he could get some transaction details but couldn’t get others. So I decided to wear my designer’s hat to solve the issue. That led to downloading the app.

EMPATHIZE

My Observation of the Opay app/ How the App Works

I had to open an Opay account and download the app in order to understand how the app works. When a customer opens an account with Opay, he gets two different account numbers for his Opay account. One is called a Static Virtual account, it has a regular account number while the second one is attached to his phone number. When a user receives payment through his static virtual account number from another bank, the transaction details doesn’t show the sender’s full details in the general transaction history dashboard. He can only get the sender’s full details on the Virtual account dashboard (he doesn’t know about the Virtual account dashboard) or through download of his statement of account.

The Virtual Account dashboard isn’t on the home screen but in the ME tab, then click the Pay Me option.

How could this be better? Well my next point of action was to find out if other Opay users experience the same issues.

RESEARCH

I reached out to 12 persons who uses the Opay app for transactions but was only able to interview just 3 of them as the others didn’t know of the Virtual account feature on the Opay app.

The interview questions was divided into three segments;

i. Finding out behaviours and motivations

  • Why do you use the Opay app?
  • Do you use it to receive payment?
  • Was there ever a time you received payment but couldn’t find the details of the sender?
  • How do you access your second account number?

ii. Finding out pain points

  • How did you feel when you couldn’t find the details of payment received to your Opay ?
  • How were you able to solve the issue?
  • What was the effect of not getting the details of payment made to your Opay account?

iii. Finding out fintech tools in use

  • Do you face the same issue with other banking apps?
  • What rating would you give those apps from 1–10?
  • Are there any things that can be done to improve on this issue?

Findings (Problem areas)

Recommendations

  1. Bring the Virtual account dashboard to the Homescreen for visibility
  2. Use one name for the Virtual account, instead of PAY ME and Virtual account (VA) in some part of the app.

DEFINE

A single user persona was created for everyone interviewed. Afterall, the all shared almost the same painpoints.

DESIGN

At this point I had to come up with sketches and high-fidelity designs that puts into consideration recommendations gotten during the research phase.

Ideation

Paper Sketches

I drew how the Home page should look like putting into consideration that the virtual account dashboard needs to be visible so that a user’s attention would be drawn to it even as a first time user.

Homepage Redesign

Transaction History Redesign

PROTOTYPE AND TESTING

After the redesign was made, usability testing was conducted with 2 users who had never used the Opay’s virtual account and 3 users who use the Virtual account number.

To interact with the prototype click here Opay’s Dashboard redesign.

Findings and Observation

  1. Users can easily switch dashboard just with a swipe.
  2. The new users were introduced to other features of the Opay Virtual account.
  3. Transaction details of sender was obvious so no need to download statement of account for that any longer.

IMPACT

  1. Users can keep their phone numbers safe while still able to enjoy all the benefits that comes with an Opay account.
  2. Time spent searching for payment details has reduced drastically.
  3. Users can now generate account details poster and assign staffs to confirm transactions. (These are some of the perks of the Opay’s Virtual account).

CONCLUSION

A happy customer will refer 10 others. If Opay decides to implement the new designs proposed here, they should expect a lot of users migrating from the conventional banks to Opay.

The perks and benefits of the Opay’s Virtual account is too good to hidden, it should be brought to the front of the app.

Do you have a design you want to want on? Reach out to me for collaboration, Linkedin, email and whatsapp, it will be an unforgettable experience.

Take a look at my portfolio here.

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