PayWave
A FinTech app for one of my clients
How can we use AI to foster strong financial habits and empower users to store and transfer their wealth while eliminating the need for individuals to carry physical cards?
Role
UX/UI Designer
Tools Used
Figma, UsabilityHub, Lucidchart, Typeform, Miro, Notion & OptimalSort.
This project includes
Market Research, User Survey & Interviews, Persona Development, Task Analysis & User Flow, Information Architecture (including Sitemaps), Wireframing, Usability Testing & Prototyping.
Challenge
As an increasing number of individuals acquire multiple cards from various financial institutions, the task of overseeing their financial well-being has become complex and challenging. Furthermore, carrying numerous cards in one's pocket has become not only inconvenient but it also poses a potential security threat.
Solution
The aim was to create a wallet that enables users to add multiple banks/ cards, set the maximum spending limit and automatically switch to the next card in priority when the current card reaches its limit. In addition I wanted to provide our users with a dashboard that enables them to easily track their financial status while making quick and hassle-free payments through NFC.
Market Research
From my competitive analysis, I found that there are three primary categories of financial applications that are available in the market :
Native apps such as Google Wallet
Banking apps like Royal Bank of Canada
Third-party applications like PayPal.
All of these apps either have various significant partnerships/tie-ups with major establishments or are too prominent to overlook.
To assess our primary competitors even further, I devoted some time in analyzing these applications from usability perspective and from a marketing perspective and analyzed them on the following lines:
What are their product offerings?
What message are they communicating through their product?
What aspects are lacking in their messaging, product, and overall offering?
User Survey & Interviews
The Defining Stage
I ran a few interviews in order to gain a deeper insight into the needs, goals, and motivations of our users, as well as to understand the environment they work in. I then consolidated the interview notes and distilled them into 4 recurring themes and insights.
Defining the Personas
Using the insights gathered from my user interviews and observations, I created 2 primary personas for my app. These personas kept me aligned and focused and helped me create a utilitarian design following the human-centred design principles.
Task Analysis & User Flow
Information Architecture
All of our hard work that we have done so far would have been imprudent if we don't have a stable Information architecture. With that goal in my mind I started to organize and structure information in a way that is intuitive, accessible, and easy to use for my end-users, I further interviewed a few of my users iteratively, the final result from running these surveys can be viewed here :
Evolution of the Design
The Developing Stage
Here is a quick peak of what’s to come next. Psst.. just wanted to show you how my design went through numerous iterations through the example on an onboarding screen
Concept Design
Initially, the priority was to rapidly generate potential solutions. Instead of finalizing the ideas, I utilized pen and paper to capture and convey my rudimentary concepts. My primary objective was to understand the user's perspective and transform design goals into a visual representation by empathizing with their flow.
Usability Testing
The crucial aspect of validating design decisions was conducting frequent user testing. To achieve this, a clickable prototype was created, and participants were engaged in recorded, remote-moderated sessions where they were presented with open questions and user scenarios. As an observer, my responsibility was to closely monitor and analyze the user's thought processes and actions to gain a comprehensive understanding.
The goal of this study was to assess the learnability of new users interacting with the virtual wallet application for the first time on a mobile. I observed and measured if users understood the project, its value, and how to complete essential initial functions such as adding a payment card, searching for a transaction, and setting up a savings plan to use the application in an optimized manner.
Design Iterations
There were quite a few iterations that were employed keeping the principles of Material Design in mind just so to reduce user's learning curve.
I also tried to stay as close to the “Happy Path” as possible by eliminating choices while keeping the user in-charge. For example, as you can see in my low fi "Setup the savings Plan" I tried giving the user a choice of creating their own savings plan, by selecting the deductible amount, setting up a target date, and frequency of deduction. But then I realized that it will cause a lot of cognitive load on the users and so you will see that in my next iterations, I employed AI to calculate the user's past earning-spending curve and deduct money accordingly.
In addition, clear language, easy-to-read fonts with a consistent layout and principles of progressive disclosure were used to reduce the cognitive load on our users.with too much information.
Final Design
Financial tools tend to lack excitement and can come across as cold, boring, and corporate. Despite offering extensive functionality and customization, they often have a bland and uninviting interface and so we made a conscious effort to keep things simple and enjoyable, both for process and interaction. I tried really hard to make this app easy to understand and fun to use.
Conclusion
Financial apps have traditionally faced a disadvantage due to strict regulatory and legal requirements, which has resulted in poorly designed, bland, and sometimes confusing features and processes. However, in the realm of UX, these limitations can be advantageous as they provide a structured framework for designers to work within.
By putting in a little extra effort and thought, designers can create clear and simple experiences that comply with regulatory requirements. This has been my goal throughout my design journey for the PayWave app and I need to mention that even though the FinTech market can be very daunting, I had the most fun designing this application.