Digital bank project completed at a Nigeria-based financial institution amidst a wide variety of other internal and customer-facing work.
The goal was to digitize most of the activities that happen in a bank branch such as account opening, card request, request for account statement, etc.
This became necessary as a result of an extensive research that revealed to us the financial and physical stress being shouldered by customers anytime they visited a bank branch. I was responsible for leading UX for the platform's mobile application.
I was able to conduct a user interview to get a sense of what users may or may not expect from a digital bank. It helped me discover their passion points.
“I want to be able to open a bank account with a few taps and start carrying out transactions without visiting a physical branch.”
“I don't need to spend close to a minute whenever I want to carry a transaction”
“I want to be able to log a complaint directly via a digital platform instead of visiting a branch or sending an email.”
Twitter was very helpful here. I went on there to get a sense of how people use online banking. We discovered the following:
I also went further to find out what industry experts think about ideal digital bank. To do so, all we need is a little time spent at Slideshare and Medium where there are plenty of presentations & articles covering how digital banking should work.
The discovery made was broken into 7 key principles:
These principles formed the key performance indicators (KPI) used to check the quality of the UX strategy.
Due to a tight deadline, I decided to create mid-high fidelity greyscale mockups to allow for more feedback from user testing.
During this process, I met 1-2 times per week with the head of department to clarify processes and test my assumptions in the design.
I compiled a deliverable of high fidelity mockups for the development team to start working and showcase the work to stakeholders. In final app has approximately 80 pages excluding details such as popups or micro-interactions.
The concept of beneficiary (as it relates to financial institutions) for a long time has been focused on the context of money transfer instead of value transfer (money, airtime, bill payment etc).
During a user testing session, I noticed that some users when trying to pay for a bill ( airtime purchase, mobile data subscription, renewal of cable TV subscription etc) they had to switch app to get the mobile number or the cable ID number and on getting back to the app, a timeout had occurred and they have to restart the process.
Upon this discovery, I suggested that a beneficiary work like your phonebook where an entity/contact, let’s say Bisi, can accommodate different subsets/properties (phone number, email, nickname, address etc). It should be able to accommodate the following properties - account details, phone number, Pay TV smartcard number, ISP unique ID etc.
It should also be contextual i.e if a user want to buy airtime for “mum” the beneficiary detail that should be fetched is the phone number.
.png)
There were conversations around the best way to display saving a new beneficiary (i.e a frequent recipient of money transfer or someone a customer pay his/her bills regularly) and I offered two options. These two options were presented to both internal and external stakeholders
I learned from many mistakes throughout the process, like testing mockups on a legitimate mobile device late into the design process and underestimating the amount of time and effort it would take to coordinate user interviews.
All of this has been important for continuing to work in the design space moving forward.
What I found most valuable was learning how to start thinking in systems. I finally felt I could focus less on how to design with tools, and more on the process itself in order to meet user needs.