Incorporating personal financial management into Inter Bank
Challenge
During UX Unicorn, I had the opportunity to choose between the proposed challenges to work on, I opted for the fintech challenge. With that, I found a group with the same interest, and we came together to work on the project during the following months.
Our group bonded easily, and the six members were very excited about the development of the project.
The initial idea of the challenge was to create a product to understand users' financial habits and provide them with a better quality of life. After some research and discussions, we realized that the best thing to do was to develop a functionality for a bank. Banco Inter was chosen because it offered several different services within the app itself, and in it, we could create a new section to work together with all the app's features.
Research
After defining the objective, we collect information about the scenario of our potential users and Banco Inter. Part of the group and I went in search of the country's financial scenario, while another part looked for data related to Inter and its clients.
I found out through the CNDL/SPC Brasil survey that 48% of Brazilians do not control their own expenses and the remaining 52%, who have some type of control, do not always do it properly. In addition, with the impacts caused by the pandemic, 80% of Brazilians had their finances even more affected, aggravating the scenario of the context presented.
My group also found that fintechs grew by around 34% over the last year. And we found the operational report of Banco Inter in 2020, which shows that the number of accounts reached 8.5 million, indicating an increase of 108% compared to 2019.
As I got new data, I would save the links for our group to use in the report. As my group was very collaborative, each task assigned to a member also had participation from the others. Therefore, the 7 articles produced were created by all the members.
To improve my understanding of the data acquired in the survey, I created an Inter account to browse the application's features and identify opportunities for the project. During this period I realized that there was no functionality to help with financial control, the app had several other features that we thought of using as an aid in our service, such as cashback, investment, e-commerce.
Users
I participated in the creation of personas, using the demographic data from the report we found as a basis, and this was the result:
We met almost daily to discuss the stages of the project, we carried out these tasks individually and in the meetings we discussed and adjusted to arrive at the result to be presented in our case.
Personas
With the proto-personas created and their journeys defined, we needed to validate if they were correct, so we set up some certainties, assumptions and doubts we had about potential users, so that we could prioritize them and create hypotheses to be validated with them.
We prioritized through the CSD Matrix and the Impact x Knowledge Matrix, then I set up, together with the group, the outline of a form to capture quantitative data about our public and candidates for a qualitative research.
After creating our form, we sent it out to as many people as possible, and we got a total of 149 responses.
Qualitative Research
After analyzing the quantitative survey result, we need to talk to some of our respondents. For this, a standard script was created to be used by the entire group. We split into pairs to facilitate the interviews, and I was able to participate in two of them at this stage, one as an interviewer and the other as a reporter.
By validating our personas, we set out to create solution alternatives for these users, using the How Might We methodology, I created four suggested questions to generate discussions and new perceptions in the solution prioritization stage.
• How could we help users to have control of cash inflows and outflows?
• How could we remind users of bills to pay?
• How could we conveniently update user data?
• How could we better organize users' finances?
Starting the Solution: pencil before pixels
We started our doodles, and each member of the group created a sketch of canvases. Then we take those drafts into the meeting and align all the ideas into a single project. During this meeting, a member drew the final draft of our joint idea to later be improved and tested.
If you want to check out our low-fidelity prototype click here.
For this first test, we also defined tasks to test the prototype, I tested it in practice with a person who fit the profile of our users.
Wireframes
After analyzing the interviews from the first test, we noticed some possible improvements and decided to make the changes in the creation of the medium fidelity prototype. Once again, each member was responsible for creating some high-quality screens, and in the end, they were polished and standardized.
With the wireframes created, we started researching the colors, typography, and the entire Inter style guide, as our interest was that our prototype was as similar as possible to the services offered within the bank's app.
Algumas telas do nosso wireframe
High Fidelity
This stage was one of which we dedicated more time since it demanded more tasks for the prototype to work and be tested again.
Here I participated in the creation of some screens, prototyping, and finally, I tested this version of our prototype with users.
To test again, we created a test script with some tasks to be followed by users and we kept the proposal of having a conductor and a writer.
In this phase, I participated in 4 tests, 2 of which were Banco Inter users. We chose to test with bank users as well, to analyze whether our product is consistent with the Inter application and find out if these users would have more difficulty or ease in accessing the prototype.
We are very pleased with the results obtained. Most of the adjustments to be made were UX Writing issues.
Access our high-fidelity prototype belw.
Writing for Users
The UX Writing tweaks were also done collectively, so we did a new survey to better understand our users and the terms most familiar to them. With this research I made a cloud of words to help us see these terms better.
With the improvements made, we divided into pairs again and performed another testing stage. I participated in 7 tests as a conductor and writer.
Presenting the project in the UX Unicorn Program
We understand that a UX project is never finished, people are subjective and are always changing, and the product must keep up with these changes.
But, before we finish with the Writing tests, we take our project to be evaluated. Here I was responsible for presenting the business objectives, as well as the UX strategy and our personas. We were very anxious to see the result of our project.
And we did!
We got the maximum grade on the project, with the feeling of accomplishment. But the work continued after the presentation and we made the Writing changes that needed to be made.
