Design Thinking : WholeBank
A study case for UX training
WholeBank is an innovative bank from Framingham, Massachusetts. They provide new solutions to their clients for saving and managing money. The latest innovation they are seeking to implement is a feature for their mobile banking application enabling users to use their mobiles for payment transactions when travelling. This will be covered in the following article.
First of all, I did a user research with five people from the target group: a person keen with technologies, confortable with online-banking procedures via the smartphone and used to travelling. The average target group were people (male and female) between 25 and 40 years-old, with university studies and speaking several languages. From the five individuals I interviewed, all of them reported having issues with their bank when travelling: firstly having to contact the bank before travelling, and, in case they forgot to do it, the card could get cancelled by the bank policies, depending on the country where the card was used when travellings. Also, some people reported the difficulties to contact their bank in case of a lost/robbed card. Three of the five interviewed users where uncomfortable using new technology payment systems such as google wallet, paypal or contactless cards.
From the five individuals I interviewed, all of them reported having issues with their bank when travelling.
Following the guidelines given by WholeBank and the different results of the study, I decided to focus on the service given by the bank when travelling. This was contrary to my first idea when thinking about the feature before interviewing the users: I thought a new payment system would facilitate the users to make transactions when travelling. The survey proved me wrong as these new technologies for payment are still not used widely because of being considered as “unsafe”. Conclusion: people remain traditional for payment transactions.
The new feature for WholeBank App would target a user-friendly travelling interface focusing on the following points:
- A calendar to mark the planned days for the trip.
- The destination country for getting detailed information on card transactions in that country, as well as current issues experienced with the type of card correponding to the one you owe.
- An easy-to-contact customer service available 24h/24h exclusive for issues reported with the payment card when travelling.
The above sketches are considered to be read in continuum, that means, from screen 1 to screen 6, as a linear process. Screen 5 and 6 will remain when users already have set their travel destination and date.
During this design process I got confirmed the importance of UX in design. It is a very powerful tool that taken from the beginning can influence the design decisions in the right direction. As a designer, by making this approach it made me feel more empathic with the audience for the product, as well as targeting their right needs. UX is POWERFUL !
