Designing an App

(while building a UX Design team)

This project was done for a subsidiary of one of Asia’s leading telecommunication groups who at the time wanted to build a product in the e-wallet and payments space. There were no major competitors in this space in the region and their established position as a market leader in telecom provided much needed credibility that would drive adoption. The early alpha prototypes of the product were originally being led by a product development team but this meant that they had unfortunately not been created in a user centric way. Thus, the key product question to be answered was :

How does one design a payment experience that reassures users about its security and safety?

In addition, this was part of a larger engagement to help the client build their design team. This meant that we had to train fresh hires in UX design best practices for everything from research to testing to making wireframes, even while they assisted us in delivering the design in a timely manner. The engagement was overall a success, as by the time it ended, the team members we’d helped train in a learning by doing process were so well versed, that they were able to onboard subsequent hires and train them similarly.

My Role

As the project director for this on-site program to help set up the in-house UX practice for this client, I worked with one other senior designer from HFI and co-ordinated the day to day activity of the client team that was being set up. From a design perspective, I managed the entire design process from stakeholder engagement and persuasion engineering, to creative direction and supervising development.

As part of setting up the client team, my responsibilities included training the team in UX best practices, guiding their ongoing projects, and with their help, delivering multiple design showcases to ensure C-level stakeholder buy in for this growing UX team. I also setup KPIs and skill requirements for future team hires and helped the team restructure the product development pipeline in a way that integrated this new design team without disrupting existing pathways.

Work and Deliverables

- Stakeholder Engagement with C-Level Executives
- UX & Strategic Review of Existing Beta Product
- Long Term Strategic Approach
- Extensive User Research
- Persuasion Strategy & Design Concept (with Page Templates)
- User Testing of Key Flows
- High Fidelity Mock-ups and Documentation
- Creative Direction - Guiding Visual Design and Development
- Training UX Design Best Practices
- Integration of Design Unit into Product Pipeline
- Setting up KPIs and Requirements for future hires

Enabling Learning by Doing

At the very start of the project, we found that two of the team members were new to UX design and had only joined the company the day before we arrived on-site. Over the course of the projects that they were to assist us in delivering, they needed to be trained in UX best practices.

I had plenty of prior experience teaching the elements of the entire design process as I was an instructor for HFI’s Mobile Design course. I first deconstructed the course into its core elements and aligned it with the expected design process and project timelines. I then restructured the learning process in such a way that every morning, a 1 hour session would provide best practices for the activities to be conducted that day, while every evening, a 1 hour session would cover reflection and clarifications. This ensured that the team always had the tools at hand to perform the day’s activities and as the learned more by doing, I was always on hand to provide guidance.

Service Blueprinting and Journey Mapping

Our team needed to understand the entire payment process from multiple perspectives. We had to use extensive observations to see how the process worked for consumers in traditional payment environments like shopping malls, grocery stores and restaurants. We also did interviews as we needed to understand the merchant perspective of the payment and purchasing process. Lastly, we needed to talk to the product team about their vision for the payment process as well.

Overall we mapped a consumer journey from the time of entering a store and deciding to make a purchase, all the way to the user exiting the store. The consumer journey had a parallel service blueprint that mapped the merchant and cashier experiences, as well as the intended experience with the new app. This led us to discover a fundamental flaw as well as gaps in the product scope that, when addressed, could increase engagement and sales.

Journey mapping reveals a key issue

Doing this thorough journey mapping and service blueprint exercise helped us uncover an issue that was previously missed. When looking at the payment process in a hyper focused way, whether it was a cash payment that involved an exchange of change and currency, or a credit card payment that required a signature, each of these processes took fewer steps and lesser time to complete than the alpha version of the app based payment process!

We included every step, from taking the wallet or purse out of the consumers pocket or bag, all the way to receiving the change and the receipt and putting it back, and we couldn’t ignore the conclusion. This helped convince the product team that the payment process needed to be redesigned in a way that it simplifies the consumer experience to the point where it is a tangibly better (and faster experience) than conventional payment methods.

Persuasion Engineering and Extensive User Testing

Using a method created at HFI, I did a round of consumer research into people of the potential target audience to better understand what are their key drives and blocks towards using a digital payment system. This was important because this was to be the first of its kind in the region, and we needed to understand if there were any barriers to adoption.

After the research, it became clear that the key blocks were related to skepticism about security, but that it could be overcome by an experience that helped the user feel efficient and trendy. We used this to come up with a design concept as well as the potential imaging and messaging for marketing campaigns. The design concept and updated payment flow was tested via an interactive prototype. In addition, we also did a comparison with the original alpha design by the product team, as this provided a great opportunity to showcase the value of the UX design process to key stakeholders.

Crafting a Future Focused Solution

After our initial concept, we wanted to ensure we provided a solution with long term implications. For this, we crafted a road map for future development that integrated AI and chatbot elements to make it a truly game changing assistant.

We integrated elements ranging from tourism and travel assistance, to easy peer to peer money transfer, and put forward a future vision for the product team to aim for. This further helped prove the value of a UX design process to C-level executives as they were able to see the potential for the app in a way that they hadn’t before.

Final Outcome

The final outcome is protected by NDA with the client and cannot be shared. However, with the app now launched, initial user reviews and feedback have been coming in and they’re overwhelmingly positive about the design.

“The future of safe and convenient payment method is here”- Beta Tester

“The UI is pretty great, the security seems strong and the possibilities are many...This could be the one” - Early praise from one of the country's most popular lifestyle pages

“The most convenient app on my phone right now. User friendly, looks great and saves me the cost and energy...A must have” - User Review

PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS AND REFLECTION

• This was my first time helping to set up a design team and it helped me learn enough about the process to have a more systematic idea of how this needs to be done.

• I gained valuable experience in stakeholder management where the key stakeholder needed evidence of the value of design, and being able to structure work in a way that constantly reinforced this value is something I’ll always carry forward for future clients as well.

• The “learning by doing” process was particularly effective and it was really satisfying to see the first people we trained, understand what they learned well enough to help train subsequent hires during our time there. It is a learning structure I continue to incorporate even in my work with Nordic Rebels.

• In hindsight, one of our big sources of delays during the work done was related to the recruitment of participants for research. Whether it’s because the participants are of a niche target group or if the scheduling is tricky, it is an aspect of the project that I’d look to start very early in future projects to avoid such delays.