Hide my account balance, please: a Zenith Bank mobile app UX review
More and more people have continued to adopt cashless transactions including myself, a Zenith Bank customer. I pay for almost everything with card or mobile transfers on my Zenith Bank app except for when I buy from petty traders who don’t have cashless transaction facilities. With the Zenith app, money transfers are done in a matter of seconds but it comes short in privacy, a huge part of a monetary transaction.
The current flow
After inputting my account number and pass-code, if correct, the app immediately ushers me into the home interface with my account balance boldly stated, in my face. At first glance, it’s the only thing you’d see.
Painpoint
The problem with this experience is the many disastrous things that could result from somebody else, asides myself, seeing my account balance in the process of me making a payment. That’s basically my entire financial data, out the door. In short, bad usability.
Without an option to hide my account balance in the app, anyone behind me or in front of my phone can see this very private information, easily. Only way to avoid this would be to use my hand to cover my balance and that’s just not enjoyable to do while trying to do other things on the app.
The solution
Being a UX designer myself, I redesigned the home screen with a simple unostentatious feature that hides my account balance by default and allows me to see the balance only when I want to (after observing my environment).
In conclusion
After over 1 year of using the app and several official complaint to the customer service but without a much needed update to how account balance is viewed, I hope Zenith Bank adopts this small but very important feature that will save me and customers like myself from possible robbery as a result of our account balance being out in the open without an option to hide it.
For companies who have mobile apps and those currently considering building one, how it looks isn’t the only thing you should be bothering about. Dedicate resources and time to understudy your potential users, their specific pain-points, their environments and let those real data drive the app design and development. Don’t assume if it looks good, it will work good too!
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
