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myALPHA POCKET PFM

Mobile Banking Tool

Overview

A study to make a difference, help Millennials with their financial challenges and empower their lives by creating engaged, lifelong relationships with ALPHA BANK.

COMPANY

ALPHA BANK
project developed for DesignLab

YEAR

2018 (December)

PROJECT DURATION

80 hours

MY ROLE

User Research, IA, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, UI Design

TOOLS USED

Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Marvel

The Challenge

The latest studies show a continual increase in mobile usage for banking. Younger generations, such as Millennials, expect to be able to do everything on-the-go.

What ALPHA BANK asks is to design a new Personal Finance Management feature that embeds within the current myAlpha mobile banking app that it embeds well and smoothly with the rest of the app. 

In the process, I went through different stages while I was evaluating my insights and designs on each stage. The design process involved the following six stages.

1. Identify the problem
2. Research to understand and get inspired by the market competition and the target audience
3. Ideate & Brainstorm by gathering ideas, producing draft sketches and low fidelity wireframes
4. Design medium and high fidelity wireframes and define UI guidelines
   
5. Build a prototype to conduct a usability testing
6. Test & Evaluate results from usability testing to identify improvements
   

Research

1-TO-1 INTERVIEWS

Conduct 1-to-1 Interviews to gain a more in-depth understanding of the needs and pain points of millennials mobile banking apps users in Greece.

MARKET RESEARCH

Check other mobile banking apps to discover what kind of features they provide and compare it with the existing mobile banking apps of ALPHA BANK. Gather info about millennials characteristics in Greece and globally.

ONLINE SURVEY

Collect insights and understand the needs and pain points of bank customers, people who use mobile banking apps and PFM apps globally.

Goals

Determine whether millennials in Greece prefer to use mobile banking and for what reasons

Identify users needs, goals and pain points while they use their banks' apps

Collect demographics of the target audience

Identify which features users miss from the apps they currently use so they can manage their finances better

1-to-1 Interviews & Online Survey

Credit card payments are most common in Greece but 80% of millennials still use cash and 64% carry cash most of the time. More millennials use cash than debit cards and 4x more millennials use cash than the top mobile payment platforms.

1-to-1 interviews with 3 participants (2 men, 1 woman) helped me understood the needs and pain points of millennial mobile banking users in Greece, their habits and their needs from banking, in general, and especially mobile banking.

At the same time, the online survey provided me with enough insights about the banking habits of people globally, the reasons why they use personal finance management tools and their expectations from mobile banking applications.

PAIN POINTS

• Greek millennials are extremely low-payed and it's almost impossible for them to leave their parents' home (since 2010, they faced the youth unemployment rate of 40% with a minimum monthly salary to drop to €600).
  

• They tend to spend most of their money to everyday expenses which they pay in cash and they cannot track (e.g. coffees, take away food, entertainment).
• They need their mobile banking app to provide them with information about all their everyday expenses.

• An app to help them complete short-term saving goals.

• Handle all their financials through a single mobile app.
  

• Be able to track their financials easy and fast from their mobile device.

Personas & Empathy maps

Information Architecture

MyAlpha app at that moment had a really complex menu in their android version. In order to build an easy-to-navigate application and at the same time add new features, I had to simplify it. I decided to simplify the main navigation using a more content-based structure and put its items into a logical order according to what users are looking for and which actions can accomplish through them.

After finalizing the structure of the main navigation I proceeded with a task flows on adding cash expenses and another one on adding a saving goal. All three of them helped me define what the app's goals are before I started designing. 

Task Flows

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

After completing the previous phases I started ideate by sketching out low-fidelity wireframes for the PMF tool core screens. I tried to keep my screens layouts close to the existing ones, so I can be consistent and make sure it embeds well and smoothly with the rest of the app. I tried different ideas to find the best way to incorporate a new feature within the existing app. 

User Interface Design

Moving to the UI design step, I was able to use all my research information I gained so I can build the look and feel of the "myAlpha Pocket" feature. I targeted into two areas of the app; how users can track their expenses paid in cash and how they can set saving goals.  
 
 

I retained the main UI elements of the existing app such as graphs, CTA buttons, typography and I chose to make a couple of significant additions like the floating action button and the bottom navigation bar to make the myAlpha Pocket features easy and quickly accessible. 

myAlpha Pocket Overview

Overview screen is a concise presentation of all users' entries in the PFM tool's elements ie their cash transactions, budgeting, and saving goals. On the top of the screen, all these data are presented in a carousel with pie charts while users can easily add their cash transactions, budgets and/or saving goals by using the floating button.

myAlpha Pocket Cash Transactions

In this screen, users can track all their cash transactions; expenses and income. All transactions are sorted from the most recent to oldest but users can change this selection using filters. Pie charts carousel on the top show the monthly total cash expenses and income.  

myAlpha Pocket Saving Goals

Saving Goals screen displays all the active saving goals the users have set. Through this screen, users can track their progress in each saving goal and check when is the next date they need to set aside money for each goal. By taping each goal users are transferred to the goal screen.

myAlpha Pocket Goal screen

Goal screen gives users extra information about the goal i.e. the minimum monthly amount they set, when it was made the last transaction and the amount left to complete the goal. The users can also delete, select as done and edit their goal from this screen. 

The results from the of the usability test sessions with three participants (two males and one female) were really promising. Participants were asked to complete three tasks using the high fidelity prototype; add a cash transaction, add a saving goal, and edit a saving goal.

All of the participants found the PFM tool easy to use, they mentioned that the interface is very familiar to them so they knew what to do in each step and they embraced the new navigation menu. Generally, they welcomed the idea of adding such a tool in a mobile banking application.

Next Steps

Working on a fin-tech project for a specific generation of people like Millennials gave me the opportunity to discover very interesting information for this generation. At the same time, trying to simplify the Information Architecture of an existing and very popular mobile banking application, and striving to stay consistent and follow the brand enriched my knowledge on IA and showed up to be really challenging,

With the first round of iteration, the next step to think about would be to design extra screens so I can provide users with informative feedback, work on the budgeting screens, and also try to find ways to make this app more personalised (e.g. allow bank's system to provide each user with the tools they need based on the products they have bought from the bank, so that users with less product don't need to get lost among features that they never will use).

Say Hi!

Find me also at...

If you have any questions or you would like to work together, you can either email me at thehmux[at]gmail.com or use the contact form.

© 2019 Helen Marouli. All rights reserved.