P2P WEB AND MOBILE APP
An e-wallet that includes p2p transfers and virtual cards
Role: UX Designer
Timeline: 4 Months
DELIVERABLES
For this project I went through the entire design process from initial research to high fidelity mockups. I have neatly documented all deliverables.
PHASE 1
PROBLEM
We have to sacrifice spreading our banking information across the internet to utilize the many digital services that exit. If our banking information is compromised, we would have a difficult time pinpointing the exact location where it was misappropriated due to the many service that contain our info.
SOLUTION: CONSIDERATION FOR TECHNOLOGY
My immediate thoughts were to utilize the newer virtual card technology to replace your card information. A virtual card is a digital card that has randomly generated information. You can use this card anywhere across the internet. When someone uses their virtual card, it then pulls money from the funding bank account of their choice.
PHASE 2
AN ABUNDANCE OF COMPETITORS
There are many personal finance apps tailored for novice users on the market. Esteemed platforms such as Apple's E-Wallet, Venmo's P2P transfers, and Privacy's virtual cards demonstrate exemplary execution in their respective functionalities. Nonetheless, despite their individual merits, an overarching concern remains: the fragmentation across separate applications. Exploring the potential amalgamation of their features to harmonize their functionalities could yield a more seamless and comprehensive experience.
CHALLENGE: STRUCTURING A COHESIVE EXPERIENCE
I conducted a comprehensive analysis of leading competitors by delineating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT), alongside performing exhaustive content audits of their respective applications. The paramount challenge lay in achieving a delicate equilibrium among various features while ensuring their seamless integration and coherence. Notably, none of the existing apps on the market encompassed the entirety of these features.
PHASE 4
USABILITY TEST: SCENARIO BASED APPROACH
I interviewed people that would relate to the personas I created. For the first set of interviews I mostly focussed on the UX over UI by asking scenario based tasks. I did this because I wanted to first validate how cohesive my solution was. I then went on to do A/B testing to get a feel for what people wanted to visually see from an e-wallet.
THOUGHTFULLY DESIGNED WITH EMPATHY
I identified three fundamental key personas that would help set the standard for an exceptional e-wallet experience. I came to the conclusion of these three particular hypothetical users by synthesizing the demographic/personality data of my interviewees during the initial rounds of interviews in the research phase.
A/B TESTING: PLAYFULLY SIMPLISTIC, CLEAN UI
After running several iterative A/B tests to find an appealing UI, I learned that people were leaning heavily toward the more minimal simplistic designs. Something akin to Apple's design language. This makes sense because it makes the app feel more like a personal wallet rather than another digital service. Also, there is already so much color coming from the bank cards.
PHASE 5
SIMPLIFYING VIRTUAL CARD COMPLEXITY
My initial idea at the beginning of this project was to have one virtual card that replaced all of your bank cards for any online services. The idea was that you would program the virtual card to charge specific cards based on the type of transaction it was ie. subscriptions or e-commerce. I realized later during user testing that my idea was overly complex and allowed for inaccuracy.
PROMOTING COLLABORATION (BILL SPLITTING)
My vision for the original design was a "single facilitator" idea where the creator of the group is the delegator of each expense. However, what if others wanted to also contribute and send requests? My mindset changed after this point and I redesigned the format to a more collaborative effort. This vastly improved efficiency. Noel 'The Traveler' and his group of friends would really appreciate this design pivot as it makes the process a more collaborative effort.
PRIORITIZING USER RETENTION
Throughout the screens of Omni Pay, I made sure to only show information that is necessary to complete any task. All unnecessary/supplemental information is kept in a separate tab or simply not included at all. This helps to not only maintain the design language of the app, but also to keep user retention throughout a task. An example of this is highly evident during the onboarding flow.
WALLET CARDS REARRANGEMENT
People have main cards that they use more often than the others. I created a very intuitive feature that allowed users to change the order of their cards based on what suited them best. In this feature I also made it easy to add new cards. I also wrote a little helper message to make it even more obvious on how to reorder the cards.
MULTI-SELECT FRIENDS (P2P TRANSFERS)
Being able to multi-select friends when sending or requesting money makes the process so much more efficient and enjoyable. Unfortunately, the competitors don't make this feature obvious to the user and some others don't even provide this option. I made sure that Omni Pay makes this feature available and intuitive for the users.
PROJECT END
Is the solution viable?
After many iterations and various inputs from my diverse set of potential users, I can conclude that I have reached a point in my designs that would satisfy their needs/goals. I feel confident that I have ended up with a viable solution to the problem.
What is something I would've done differently in retrospect?
When I did my initial interviews I received answers that weren’t so surprising or unique. And I believe it was because of how formal I treated the interviews. I read off a script mostly because I didn’t want to accidentally miss any details. But that unfortunately may have influenced my participants to react similar. I think they were trying to give me answers based on how they wanted to be perceived instead of saying how they genuinely felt even though I let them know they could speak freely and honest.
The reason I say all of this is because on my off time I talked about my project with others and received the most insightful feedback that influenced a lot in my project. I believe this was because I wasn’t talking at them, I was talking with them. I let the conversation bounce from topic to topic naturally.
