Jerry Garay

Signal Financial

Modern Mobile Banking

Brief

3-person UX Team Project for DC Local Credit Union, Signal Financial

Objective

Create a modernized banking app for smartphones. With a focus on ease of use.

Challenge

Determine what current needs are the banking customer today. What features could benefit a problem not being addressed by Signal currently. 

Methodology

Competitive Analysis, User Survey, SCRUMM, Design Studio sessions, Wire flows, Personas, Task analysis, User flow, Modular prototyping, User Testing

Research

Ideation

Common patterns from user research told us that many people have the intentions and desire to save. But lack the current habits that aid in that behavior. People are not actively depositing money to separate savings towards a specific goal. This leaves room for failure. Even when the user has the funds to do it in regularity

Passive Savings

So we looked at passive saving methods. Also noticed that some people can be hesitant to set that up because of the sudden significant deduction in checking accounts at each cycle. So we looked into tackling this two ways. 

• Avoid separate savings account 
• Make savings deductions less noticeable

With this in mind we thought to implement a subtle passive savings feature. Where smaller, less disruptive deductions happened daily. Savings allocation could still equal to the same as monthly deposits would, but not be as disruptive to the checking balance total as the deductions are spread throughout the whole month.

So for example, instead of the the drop from Oct 31 to Nov 1 being -$210 to your checking, it would be $7. The same deduction you are used to seeing regularly. 

Safe to Spend

With mobile banking apps, the most frequently done activity for almost all users is checking the Available Balance of the checking account. The problem with the balance total is that it represents a static number when people checking funds are really always in flux. Auto bill pay is a common feature used to automatically withdraw money to pay bills. So since money has to already be allocated to pay for bills, the money total given is not truly the best metric for seeing what finds are available for you to spend. So it's left to the users to do the math. The safe to spend feature is a pre-calculated total of a users checking account with outgoing funds in mind. This doesn't mean any money is being subtracted from the users checking account funds. The safe to spend total just gives a user the true total of money that's free to spend without putting any bill payments at risk or affecting allocations to savings goals. 

Saving with Checking Account

So its apparent that managing savings is hassle of a task for many users. But almost everyone wants to save for a goal (rainy day or afford the dream vacation or purchase a new computer etc.) In order to avoid managing a single savings accounts for multiple savings or purchase goals, we looked at automating easy to set up savings goals from inside a checking account. Since a Safe-to-Spend Total is established to present the user with their truly disposable funds. Users could setup a savings goal just as they would assign a bill payment. All savings are still part of the same Checking balance total but pre-calculated "deductions" are set to the safe-to-spend number. Allocating those funds towards a savings goal. 

Prototyping

Interactions

Animations created with Principle and Sketch