Role: UX Research - Product Design - Branding
Duration: 12 months
Platforms: IOS + Android Apps
Industry: Blockchain+ Fintech
01/Project Overview
Amaano is a web 3.0 enabled Fintech start-up that aims at facilitating international money transfer using blockchain technology. As a team we are developing an elegant yet functional user experience built on strong and consistent user insight. We developed our design systems using Figma as well as marketing materials currently being used across Africa. I am in charge of working to ensure our designs are updated as we receive feedback to make sure that our products align with solving our users' needs.
My Role
02/Empathizing with our users
Exploring the problem
With the majority of people in the developing world now connected to smartphones, while the banking system has failed to make the same kind of rows, we hypothesized that we can close that gap by creating a mobile app that would make transferring money as easy as making a WhatsApp call.
Preliminary Research
We had a few assumptions about our users and their relationship to the 2 main technologies we deemed necessary to make our product work: Blockchain technology and relationship to smartphones. As such, we curated our research based on that in addition to a more general understanding of user's behaviors.
From our preliminary research, our assumption that mobile payment is a growing market was correct, we proceeded to conduct our own research to gather more details from our users. Another technology we thought about using was the blockchain. The main assumption there was if we could use blockchain to transfer funds, we could minimize fees and increase transaction speed.
After confirming some of our assumptions about the market, we talked to our users through surveys and interview to gather some insight about them and identify some key pain points in order to crystalize our goals based on their input
Surveys:
We conducted a series of surveys using google forms to get some quantitative data about our user's relationship to keep technologies.
Interviews:
I conducted interviews in 2 different countries so as to understand the likely pain points of users, their needs, and behavior and to avoid implicit bias or any bias for that matter. I interviewed 9 adults in our core target demographics aged 25-70.
Key Insights
03/Defining our solution
After conducting our research and developing a better understanding of our users, we summarize all our findings into actionable and measurable goals to guide us in our design process.
Affinity Mapping
We used affinity mapping in order to organize and decipher all the qualitative data we gathered from our users during the interviews, we then organized all the insights into groups on similarity. As a result, we came up 4 main user groups
After understanding key insights, we developed personas for each of the user groups. Below is an example used as our design companion throughout the project.
04/Ideating on potential solutions
Competitive Analysis: Are we solving the right problem?
Before I start the project, I need to make sure I’m solving the right problem. To do that, I conducted a competitive analysis on the Western Union, Flutterwave & Worldremit to better understand how they addressed their user needs since their target audience is similar to ours
Design Goals:
After completing all the preliminary research, we started brainstorming and defining what goals we should target in order to develop the product our users want based on our research.
User Flows and Low Fidelity Prototypes
Once we had a clear idea of our users and their needs, we were able to ideate on user flows and developed prototypes for the payment side first. Our goal was to use a crypto wallet so our customers can have full control and safety over their own funds.
We developed some low-fi prototypes in order to determine how our users felt about the crypto wallet feature.
They thought the wallet was too risky for them and did not like the extra responsibility of the recovery phrase.
We had overestimated our user's comfort with the self-custody wallet. This was also a problem for the company because it would affect our original business model and would result in higher costs. We would have to keep a lot more data on our servers than initially planned. We brainstormed on the merits and decided to replace the 12 phrase steps with a generative one where both us and users would have a copy thus removing the risk of permanent loss while keeping the benefits of blockchain's low cost and borderless attributes.
Redesigned user flow and low-fi after testing results
After we automated the 12 recovery phrase keys, we conducted another test, our number increased drastically,
we saw:
73% faster onboarding then before
79% of our users were able to send money without asking for help or getting stuck.
05/ Developing high-fidelity designs & prototypes
I am big advocate for early-stage testing, as such, We used surveys to get quick data on designs and did a lot of rapid iterations. We wanted to get a lot of quick consistent feedback on our designs instead of relying only on our experience and prior research.
After getting feedback that was focused on our user experience from our Mid-Fi designs we continued the iterative process with emphasis on the UI and some user floes that needed a bit more refinement.
Material Library
After reiterating more wireframes, we developed our design system to assure consistency efficiency and consistency when developing our Hi-fi
Our High fidelity prototypes
During our usability testing, one of the main points that aroused that we wanted to remedy was the fact a lot of our users live in areas with no electricity, as such night visibility was mentioned so we developed a dark mode to solve that issue.
Outcome
We’ve successfully created an app that solves the major problem of affordable and instant international payment. We got a lot of positive feedback about an idea and app. Moreover, we’ve improved the usability by 33%. However, we can’t tell if our product will be received in the same way in regions that were not able to reach this time, so it would be nice to revisit the project in the future and test that out.
Takeaways
1- We’ve noticed that it’s better to avoid different UI implementations on the hi-fi wireframes stage since users were distracted and continued giving feedback more on the look and feel rather than usability issues of the app.
2- By working in a cross-functional team with engineers, product managers, and researchers, I learned that including engineers early in the design process provides a fresh perspective to the problem, helps the team understand all the technical constraints, and leads to an efficient design process.
2- By working in a cross-functional team with engineers, product managers, and researchers, I learned that including engineers early in the design process provides a fresh perspective to the problem, helps the team understand all the technical constraints, and leads to an efficient design process.
Thank you for your time!
