Neo-Bank for women

Sector

Finance, Design, Community, Neo-bank

Role

Designing the app's MVP , identifying pain points , UX research, Iterations on MVP

Brief

Neo-banks have evolved and grown significantly worldwide as well as in India despite their relatively recent entry into the larger FinTech segment. The definition of neo-banks has changed as they are differentiating themselves from online banking services and moving away from being centred only around digital banking to focus on providing a superior customer experience.

But this evolution of fin-tech in India has left behind a very key demographic - Women. Today India has 13.5–15.7 million women-owned enterprises, representing 20% of all enterprises. The call to action is for a coordinated effort across a few key themes—
1.Equal access to finance
2.Expansion of mentorship and networking channels
3.Tailored knowledge and capability building and cultural openness.
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So how do we provide a platform that combines all themes into one by creating a financial community for women.
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RESEARCH AND FINDINGS

The pilot program

The aim of this pilot was to understand the financial needs, basic money management habits and financial goals of the ladies - what their money management behaviour is, and what they want with respect to saving, investing and loans. This survey was done via 18 posts in SHEROES Money Matters community where women from different backgrounds, locations, age and occupation participated. We chose to do posts and carry out conversations to help women share their views and experiences freely.

Loan pilot survey run in SHEROES- Money Matters community

User Quote

“For me personally its the reluctance which arises from the lack of initiation at home while growing up. Of late I have been a part of all financial decisions by being aware of it. That's my beginning. WithMoneymatters the awareness has increased.”

EXISTING DESIGN

The user

To make sure that my decisions moving forward in the process are user-centered, I wanted to have a clear understanding of who our users are. Using what I learned from patterns from our community and surveys, I created user personas to represent who I will be designing for.

https://www.figma.com/file/n4kLAFKZiJK2PtaMghZae8/Persona-and-Scenarios?node-id=16%3A2

Initial proposal- MVP Design

We created a production-ready product based on collaboration with users and translated the major requirements from stakeholders into the product. Since there were a community "Money Matters" and a Loan Pilot already on the go, the aim of the MVP was also to get both the offline processes onto the app.

We got all the requirements in phases and set for development of the product

MVP - App screens

Community- Knowledge hub

Financial products- Loans and Goals

Profile- User's dashboard

How current app looks

Talking to the users

After seeing that we had so much traffic on the app- but too many drop offs during sign ups / submitting loan applications ,we determined that our target user would be the one seeking the finance product who will then be retained by the community.
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In order to understand this persona a bit more, we spoke to our own customers from the pilot and existing loan users on the Beta app. By doing this, we could also capture how they were using our current product and what value they took from it.
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Some of their major pain points came from the missed focus of the navigation and too less value for the users.

Starting with Questions...

Decoding information about the users and attributes of phenomena of how they interact with our app. This allows us to get a stronger insight into their mind and trigger points that make them take a loan, use the community or attend events.

We created a list of ‘How Might We…’ questions to help us better align our user’s tasks and goals:
- How might we provide an experience that is engaging and valuable to our users?
- How might we provide a simple 'One touch product' where they get a financial product in minutes?
- How might we provide a tailored experience that allows users to get the most knowledge from our app?

REDESIGN PROCESS

Prototype testing

I ran a prototype testing session with our users to who we want to target and check if our assumptions on MVP was right. I used this technique to determine which functionalities of the app should stay, be relocated or be eliminated based on our platform’s information architecture and how much value it was adding to the users.

Internal testing

I conducted a ideation session with our customer-facing teammates to quickly inquire what should be added or removed from our app. The purpose of this was to discover potential quick wins on simple improvements that could be executed quickly.

Testing prototype flows with users

Major
Business Pain Point

- Users feel this is an NGO and expect instant loans and help .Look and feel of the app doesn't give a trusting / neo-bank vibe.
- Drop offs in sign up - due to the selfie verification which most women feel very uncomfortable with.
- Too many men gaming the verification by using fake pictures

DEFINE

Feedbacks and Pain points

1.A big request was changing the look of the app to more modern and clean
2. Easier onboarding process- by introducing CKYC- Reducing time and effort of both user and our internal team to verify the user‍

The redesign journey

To validate these findings, we went back to the existing design and pulled it apart to see which features can be retained, which can be completely changed or easily redesigned to make the user's experience better.
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Current Onboarding journey

Findings and ideations

Pain points in Onboarding.pdf

DESIGN

Iterate and Iterate

Based on our all of our findings shown above, we narrowed our focus into 4 areas for potential improvement of our original MVP:
-Improve onboarding by introducing KYC
-Improve navigation
-Improve actionability- Creating posts & interactions
-Improve the UI of the app

View whole prototype

Improve Tooltips and notifications

How can we inform our users they’ve incomplete application?
How we notify them that they need to re-upload documents for verification ?
We worked on improving communication on the app and also on other mediums to get faster connectivity with the user

Challenges and restraints

Unfortunately, one of our main challenges is the lack of resources and time that we have day to day, as like most startups, we’re stretched quite thin!
With this challenge, we often have to reiterate our designs in order to be achievable within time and technical constraints, while still providing more value to our users.

Next steps

The released version of the app has been well received by our users. It also has helped our stakeholders by reducing a lot of manual labour by the CS team. However, there are still improvements that can be made. The user should be able to apply for a loan quickly and not re-submit many documents.

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Apart from this, the whole UI style guide was redesigned as a brand- for social and the app. Check out the new Brand guideline I created here.