Mobile banking app for visually impaired people
Industry: Banking
Segment: B2C
Contribution: UX Management, UX Research
Context
In Russia is up to 5 millions of people in Russia are visually impaired. The client in 2016 had an aim to become accessible for all customers in all the channel and strengthen the brand.
The brief
To create mobile app for visually impaired group of customers.
The concern
- Client doesn’t have an infrastructure for people with any disability in any channel
- As Clients performs governments operations (like pension, household payments) and elderly people are not familiar with technologies, overall environment is not friendly for them
Planning
Client wants to understand the behaviour patterns of this group of people and create the service that makes banking accessible for them.
Hypothesis
Mobile application is the most comfortable channel to approach this group of people due to penetration of smartphones and mobile-first trend.
Discovery Team
- Product owner – guy who previously worked in the agency creating physical accessible environments
- Business analyst – a guy from innovations team, who is responsible for translation business architecture to technical requirements.
- UX Researcher – Me, who is responsible for all research activities, idea validations, usability testing and customer journeys
- UI Designer – a guy who is responsible for UI of a mobile app
Research
Challenge
We strived to understand the circumstances these people live in, their environment and needs. But be didn’t know where to find them.
We decided to walk a mile in their shoes and went the excursion ‘Walks in the dark’ (similar to "Dialogs in the dark" in Hamburg).
In 1h we lived a day of visually impaired person guided by fully of partially blind guides.
This excursion gave us an access to the community of visually impaired people.
Interviews
Methodology:
Methods: Ethnography and interview
Research Focus
- Their environment: which platforms do the use (PC, mobile)
- Which programs do they usually use and for which purposes
- How do the communicate with other people
- Their experience with Banks and financial products. Which banking operations do they do? Themselves or with the help of caretaker? Which one? How do the access them via which channels?
- Which problems do they face and how do they solve them
Takeaways
- They are not isolated, they pretty much talk to each other via internet
- They have and use PCs, easily can type, but prefer to speak and listen (sure, they use enlargers or programs that transform text to the voice)
- Mostly they use financial products by themselves via calling to CS OR coming to physical branch
- The biggest problem is to get to the Branch and navigate there
- Customers visit Bank about 1 time per month to do common operations – to take money from account and pay for the utilities and public services
- It is often happens, that in one closes banking branch can’t provide all necessary operations
Personas
Basing on the interviews we defined 2 personas, that were equally important
Design iterations
We had 3 user tests and tested 3 approaches. After each of them we refined our previous one
User Flow 1
Basing on the information from the interviews, we created the approach to the problem solving that we thought was the best solution.
Results of user test 1
Despite the high expectations we got negative feedback:
– It's so much fun, but to get the simple information like account statement doesn’t worth it
– I’d better call to the customer service with Voice assistant to get this information
Main issues
- Log in data is long
- Dashboard is hard to navigate
New insight: They call to Customer service to get the basic information about account statement
User Flow 2
We decided to change the approach, deviate from the main idea we had in the beginning
In the bank recently were introduced the personal managers even for non VIP clients
Results of user test 2
– Way much better, but still, how can I trust the person on the phone?
In general, this model was successful in terms of business process and business decision making, because it required way less effort from users, but overall from most of the users we received the feedback that they are not satisfied because of the lack of personal communication
User Flow 3
We decided to navigate them directly to the closest open banking branch
Results of user test 3
Unexpectedly with this solution tested users felt the most comfortably, because the biggest pain point was solved – the navigation to the closest banking branch accessible for them and has all the operation they wanted to do
Final solution
As long as the final aim was to digitalize services for visually impaired people, it was made a decision to combine two approaches: Solution 2 and Solution 3.
To the first stage was taken easier solution – to navigate customers to the banking branch. And as a second – digitalization of the services for them
Future development of the project
During later user tests and contextual researches, we found out, that the problem of navigation in the offices is more critical than we expected and decided to prioritize improve that: better queuing system, voice navigation inside the offices, Braille fonts, space re-designing.
For meeting the goal of digitalization of the services, Client hired visually impaired UX researcher to help us understand what we are doing and test interfaces.
Later on, colleagues created guide how to design to take into account needs of all types of users including visually impaired ones.
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MegaFon, Moscow, Russia, 2017