Case study: improving transfer money flow on the BCA mobile app
Independent study
Challenge
BCA (Bank Central Asia) is one of the leading Banks in Indonesia. As the user of Bank BCA myself, I found some areas that can be improved, especially in the transfer money flow on its mobile app. How could Bank BCA make the transfer money flow more comfortable and efficient for their mobile app users?
Approach
I used heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis to evaluate the current flow of transferring money on the BCA mobile app. The findings would be best coupled with interviews and usability tests to get additional insights from the target users.
Potential problems
Some potential problems with the current transfer money flow on the BCA mobile app are:
- No clear structures on the Transfer page. At a glance, it’s not clear which items are the main actions of the page, and it’s also not clear which one belongs to which. This might confuse, especially new users.
- Transfer money to a new bank account’s flow is broken. Users are brought back to the Transfer page, instead of being guided to the next steps.
- Related items (such as add a new account & transfer money, or transfer to BCA account & different banks) can be combined to prevent errors or to increase efficiency.
Recommendations
- Fix the information architecture on the Transfer page
- Fix the transfer money flow
What research could be done
Even though I only used heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis in this study, there are many other approaches to help us make more informed hypotheses and recommendations. Some of them are:
- Do usability tests for the existing app to both new and existing users to identify usability issues.
- Interview (and observe) existing users to see how they currently transfer money on the mobile app so that we could understand their goals, contexts and pain points.
- Do card sorting to evaluate the existing information architecture and see how it would make more sense to the users.
- Review analytics to see if there is any demographic or behavioral pattern to inform what to research or to inform the design. Imagine, for example, we find that many users transfer money to the last accounts they’ve transferred. This would suggest that having “Recent Accounts” on the Transfer page might help them achieve that task faster. Or maybe we find that many users transfer to the same account with the same amount regularly. In that case, we could contact them for interviews and see if there’s a need for scheduled transfers.
- Talk to the customer-facing team to see what people have asked or complained about transferring money on the mobile app.
- Do online listening through Google, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) or app platforms (App Store and Google Plays Store), to see what people say about their experience of transferring money on the mobile app.
- Run an A/B test to see which one works better for the KPIs (E.g. average completion times and completion rates).
Last but not least
If it’s a real project, it’s important to keep the stakeholders and the other teams (Product, Design, Data Science, Engineering) in the loop.
For example, we might theorize that combining the transfer list (BCA and other banks) would make the most sense to users. However, if we know earlier from the engineering side that combining the list is not feasible, we might be considering another way to address that.
By taking their constraints, concerns, and interests into consideration throughout the process, we could make our design and research effort more relevant and eventually more impactful.
