A Banking App for Millions
This was done for one of India’s largest private financial institutions and in fact, it was my one of my earliest as a team lead. The client’s existing app had seen successful adoption for nearly 5 years and that whole time, the focus had been on incorporating the 100+ features available on their web platform. This however meant that UX took a back seat and as features increased, the usability suffered. So the key question was:
How does one modernize a banking app experience that’s used by millions across urban and rural India?
It needed to bring modern design and also retain the full featured banking experience that people relied on. In addition, at the first client meeting, our promise was to bring it to world class standards that are award worthy. Using a user centered design process, iteration and user validation, we succeeded at that and won an award for the “Best Mobile Experience” in the Bank Customer Experience Awards 2017.
Project Overview
My Role
As the design lead, I managed a team that included three others, two Senior UX Designers and a Visual Design Lead. I also handled most client interactions which included a range of C-level interviews to understand their vision and gain buy-in for the process. On HFI’s side, I reported to a project director who had oversaw this project.
This was my first opportunity to handle many facets of a strategic design process which included futures thinking and creative direction while also working with other client vendors to supervise detailed design, visual design and the development process.
Work and Deliverables
UX & Strategic Review of Mobile and Tablet Apps
Long Term Strategic Approach
Ethnographic Research in Rural & Urban India
Competitive Benchmarking & Trends Analysis Driven Future Concept
Wireframing and Prototyping in Axure and Marvel
User Testing of Key Flows
High Fidelity Mock-ups, Page Templates and Feature Documentation
Creative Direction - Supervising Visual Design and Development with Client’s 3rd Party Vendors
Overall Process
Stakeholder Discussions to Capture Business Vision
Our team conducted a series of discussions with key stakeholders from a variety of departments from marketing to IT and security. This was important to help determine the diverse perspectives of VPs and C-level executives at the bank. Our visual design lead also conducted an innovative exercise to help create a unified visual direction that has stakeholder buy in for the overall design.
Ethnographic Research in Urban and Rural India
Once we knew what business wanted, it was time to hear from our users. We prepared a one hour semi-structured interview that captured the users view on money and banking, their views on the current mobile app and their wishes for a future app.
Our team visited not just urban areas but also semi-urban and rural regions in North and South India, where mobile banking was gaining traction. This provided several insights that had a direct bearing on new features and also helped our team understand pain points as well as differences in usage patterns and financial literacy between these two demographics.
Research helped overturn misplaced assumptions
One of the most interesting moments during the research process occurred in the rural interviews. Everyone, from the client to our team and organization, approached this project with a laser focus on redesigning an app that works for urban and rural India. What we didn’t anticipate was when a couple of rural users said “oh, a new app would be nice, but it doesn’t help much because we don’t get internet connectivity unless we’re in specific locations”. This finding made us all question our biases and privilege, and how we had taken the presence of connectivity for granted.
We realized how there was no point promising '“banking services at your fingertips” when there’s no internet connectivity to get this done. This finding inspired our team to design a feature that would work even when there was no 3G or 4G data access. We discovered that the bank had a USSD code driven set of functions that required just SMS connectivity, not data. This was leveraged to create an “offline” mode that let us enable some core app features, even without the internet!
Card Sorting to Simplify Terminology and the Information Architecture.
As part of the research process, there was extensive card sorting exercises done in order to finalize the information architecture and understand the mental model behind how users saw the app structure. The old app had over a 100 features and we selected the most frequently used 40-50 functions for this exercise.
Doing this provided not just a simplified classification of functions, but also a lot of clarity on how easy (or difficult) the various banking terms were for people and whether alternatives could be developed that were more widely understood.
Stakeholder Involvement Throughout the Design Process
One of the most fruitful aspects of this project was the close engagement with key stakeholders, almost to the level where they were honorary project team members. This allowed us to perfectly balance the user needs with business needs, goals and capabilities and deliver a successful final product.
Getting early buy in from key stakeholders, and having them involved at every step also allowed for us to navigate any tricky organizational challenges that might have emerged otherwise. It sped up approvals for features while also preventing us from falling into the designers trap of creating something unfeasible for implementation.
Extensive User Testing Driving Iteration
Once our design was defined based on our research findings, we conducted a round of user testing, both in HFI’s testing lab in Mumbai but also on location in the same regions that we conducted our research as well. Barring a few things that needed to be tweaked, our user testing proved to be confirmation that we had an effective solution.
user testing provides an amazing insight
As part of the redesign, we included a “Recent Activity” tab that allowed users to see their recent transactions. However, during testing, users consistently struggled to discover this feature, even if it was a feature that testers said they wanted and was prominently visible on the home screen.
At one point during testing, we described the feature to a participant who mentioned that they wanted something like that. This participant in rural India remarked how “oh, this is like the mini statement we get from the ATM to see this information, why don’t you just call it that?”.
Suddenly, it all fell into place. Years of using ATMs had established the name firmly in the mental model of users. The feature was renamed as “Mini Statement” and in subsequent testing, it was instantly recognizable to every user due to their innate familiarity with the term.
Final Outcome
The final outcome is protected by NDA with the client and cannot be shared. However, with the app now launched, user reviews and feedback suggest that, people are overwhelmingly positive about the design.
In addition, the app also won two awards, including the “Best Mobile Experience” in the Bank Customer Experience Awards 2017.
“With an ability to understand customers' needs, and tailor and serve up appropriate content, users will undoubtedly welcome the user experience and want to explore the app's features.” - The Judges of the BCX Awards 2017
Personal Highlights and reflection
It was exciting to create an app that will impact the user experience for millions across a country that is the world's fastest growing mobile phone market
I gained valuable experience in stakeholder management, planning and organizing research and in the latter stages, creative direction
Looking back at the project, one of the things I’d do differently would be to involve external vendors who handled development at an earlier stage in the process. This would have simplified the documentation process, brought developers on board with the design vision, and also reduced the lag time between completing the design and the final app launch