Mobile banking app for visually impaired people

Context

 In Russia is up to 5 millions of people in Russia are visually impaired. The Bank 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

• Bank doesn’t have an infrastructure for people with any disability in any channel
• As Bank performs governments operations (like pension, household payments) and elderly people are not familiar with technologies, overall environment is not friendly for them

Planning

Bank 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

We agreed with some of them to visit them and have a talk

Methods: Ethnography and interview

What did we study?

• 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

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: contact a personal consultant and easy navigator to the Banking office that provides needed services and suitable for mentioned disabilities.

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, Bank 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.