Pastel Bank Mobile App
Design Sprint with Scotiabank Digital Factory
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Project: Design Sprint, Pastel Bank Mobile App
Team: Begum Oral, Florian Chu, Scott Sobere-Yu, Janus Tiu, Amanda Friday
Date: February 2020
Industry: Fintech
Duration: 5 days
Role: UX/UI Designer
Tools: Pen + Paper, Sketch, Invision
Pastel bank is a mobile app that helps young professionals make informed decisions for better financial planning.
A lot of beginners wonder why a sprint is a five-day process. Why not 4, 7, or 10; less than five is not enough, and over five might cause a loss of project continuity. For this project, our task was to design a native mobile app targeting young professionals with student debt and disposable income and present our solution to the Scotiabank Digital Factory team on Friday. Here's our plan and solutions, which are explained daily to complete this sprint with the help of the Scotiabank team.
MONDAY
1-Sprint Planning & User Research
After we met with the Scotiabank Digital Factory team in the morning, they introduced us to three design challenges, and we were expected to choose one. Options were around first-time bankers, young professionals, or retirees. We decided to design for young professionals because it'd be more convenient and faster for us to conduct research, design, and test in a short time.
The Scotiabank team explained the project requirements and shared industry tips and insights. We first created a plan and a work breakdown structure to stay organized and on top of everything. Our starting point was a group brainstorming session to gather all the thoughts and ideas and start the research phase as soon as possible.
As we spent the entire afternoon on user research and interviews, we found out that 50% of students finish university with debt, and their average student debt is $28K. Also, most fresh graduates lack information about loans and find it confusing to navigate the government's loan website to plan and pay their loans. Moreover, the average time to pay off debt takes 9.5 years, so we needed a solution to minimize the length of an unpleasant number of years and help young professionals reach their financial goals.
Based on user insights, we had a good understanding of young professionals’ experiences and frustrations, and we decided to focus on paying loan payments as an area of solution. Considering fintech industry trends, we identified two trends that could support our solution: hyper-personalization and robotic processing automation (RPA).
Opportunities:
1-Hyper-Personalization
81% of consumers want brands to understand them better, and hyper-personalization is an advanced way for brands to treats customers as individuals with different preferences to provide a unique customer experience that's different for each consumer or user. It's done by creating customized and focused experiences through data, analytics, automation, and AI.
2-Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology that eliminates manual entry to speed up tasks, and it’s great for repetitive processes, such as automating invoices, bills, loan payments, etc.
Our Research Process
TUESDAY
2-Synthesis
Collectively, we gathered common motivations, challenges, and behaviours from our interviewees. Our findings showed that financial freedom is the biggest motivation for young professionals, and their biggest challenge is student loan websites being confusing and not user-friendly.
How about their behaviours? We also asked our interviewees if they were given an extra $500 a month what would they do with that money. Surprisingly, all participants stated that they would use that money to pay off their student debt faster, which finally led us to our how might we question. Later, it was time for us to have a whiteboard session to generate ideas and find solutions.
How might we help young professionals make informed decisions based on their financial goals?
Persona
As we gathered common motivations, pain points, and behaviours from our user interviews, we used it all to create our persona, Jessica White, a University of Toronto graduate living in Toronto with a roommate. She found her first job as a sales consultant and has some disposable income for the first time. Also, she has debt, and her biggest struggle is to find a financial plan that allows her to use her disposable income most logically.
Storyboarding
We created a storyboard of our persona's journey to becoming debt-free by showing all our features in one space. Our persona, Jessica, works full-time and has student debt. For the first time, she has disposable income and aims to be debt-free in 5 years. Jessica googles and finds her current bank's marketing site, where she sees the Pastel app. She downloads it and signs up. After she completes onboarding, she sets up her student loan, the amount, and notifications to get updates.
Even though there were some features available on the market, such as faster student debt repayments, lump-sum payments, and repayment budgeting, they were not easily accessible in one space, so we tried to tackle that.
WEDNESDAY
3-Ideation
After reviewing existing ideas and thinking further on how to improve those ideas, we started concept sketching.
Notes
Every team member spent some time jotting down notes on paper. We wrote anything looked useful & purposeful and circled the notes that stood out.
Solution Sketches
It's each person's best idea! At this stage, everyone chose their best idea and created a storyboard that would show how users could interact with our product.
Our best idea was selected: a calculator that can easily calculate or rearrange student loan payments.
4-Prototype & UI
We started designing low-fi wireframes and worked up to the high-fi prototype. The UI part was faster and smoother as the colors were predetermined by the Scotiabank team.
Also, we created our logo, took the rest of our time to exchange ideas on branding, and used typography and icons suitable for IOS. Our team used Sketch and InVision to create wireframes and prototypes.
Color Palette for UI
Logo for Pastel Bank
THURSDAY
5- Test & Iterate
Today’s morning standup was focused on our progress, user testing, iterations, and the presentation. The script was written with a well-defined scenario and a task for user testing.
According to Jacob Nielsen - a user research expert- 85% of the problems are observed after only five people because testing with more people wouldn't lead to more insights, just a lot more work. So, we recruited five participants to run user testing. The primary task was to create a plan to pay off student loans within five years, and the subtask was to set up auto-payment.
All participants completed the tasks successfully, and we were happy to hear some positive feedback about the calculator being functional, user- friendly, and easy to navigate.
Prototype
Here's our final prototype after several iterations and revisions.
FRIDAY
6- Presentation Day
Today is the Sprint day!
We finally got to present our solution to the Scotiabank team, our class, educators, and teaching assistants. Not only did the Scotiabank team find the idea of a calculator useful, but also asked us questions about our design process, strategy, and the solution.
BrainStation & Scotiabank Collaboration
With My Team After Our Presentation
Key Learnings
This sprint has been a unique experience for all of us. I was lucky to work with a team that was motivated and supportive. With having tight deadlines in this project, we learnt how to use our time efficiently and collaborate with trust and kindness. Also, we learnt more about each other and grew our empathy during the sprint process. Morning standups were crucial to planning the day, going over deliverables, discussing our design, and considering feedback and comments.
Being a part of such a project and working with design leaders from the industry was invaluable. Many thanks to my lovely team, educators, teaching assistants, and the Scotiabank Digital Factory team for making this sprint happen!
PS: I strongly recommend reading Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas In Just 5 Days, by Jake Knapp. This book helped me understand the sprint process better and collaborate effectively.
Thanks for reading!