Role
UX | UI Designer
Duration
3 months (July 2021)
Inter My Finances is the final project of my UX Design specialization on Program UX Unicorn. The objective was put in practice the UX methodologies in a real problem, that way, with my team, we choose the Banco Inter (a Brazilian digital bank) as a start point, to have a real client with real data.
During this article I will focus on my contributions in the project, although I need to thank you and point the exceptional work of all my team. Special thanks to Carolina Kieling, Caroline Bittencourt, Karin Bandartchuc, Marcelle Menezes, Sandra Yoshie.
Context
In 2020 the Brazilian financial sector had a big growth, especially some fintechs. Despite the Covid pandemics, these companies grew by around 34%. In turn, the Banco Inter in its operational report from the same year announced a 108% growth in the accounts number in comparison to the previous year.
Although, in research made by CNDL/SPC Brasil showed us that 48% of Brazilians don’t control their expenses and the other 52%, that has some financial control, don’t do this in a right manner. In addition, with the pandemic’s impact, 80% of Brazilians had their finances even more affected, getting the scenario worse and reinforcing the importance to control expenses.
Challenge
How can we offer a personal financial management to collaborate with the optimization of expenses and to improve the quality of life from the customers of Banco Inter.
The Banco Inter has as slogan “Create what makes people’s life easier” and, to achieve this mission, it offers features as cashback and financial investments, although it doesn’t had any solution for expenses management and planning goals.
Solution
Provide an area for user expense control, integrated with the differentials offered by Inter to accelerate the personal goals of its customers.
By providing a better view of expenses and earnings, Banco Inter users are benefited from keeping their finances centralized in just one place, resulting in greater exposure to other services organically, and increased interest in staying within this ecosystem, also benefiting the institution.
Discovery
Starting from a better view of the market and with the projected objectives, we developed the personas of our users. Based on them, we were able to identify the main difficulties and complaints of our target audience, in terms of financial planning, as well as thinking about opportunities and solutions to solve their pains.
Luizão
“I try to take notes of everything, but I always lose myself. Wasn’t suppose my bills been this much…”
Age:
20 years
Occupation:
Mall Salesman
Educational Level:
Attending in Biology
Sallary:
R$ 1.500/m + sales commissions
Pains
Doesn’t know how he spends so much money;
No patience to update his expenses record;
Insecure about his financial future;
Wishes to save money for studying abroad.
Painkillers
Intuitive and constantly updated management;
Optimized updating through bank statements;
Long-term financial planning;
Tracking of goals and objectives.
Kátia
“"I would like to have my financial independence, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck...”
Age:
32 years
Occupation:
Social Media
Educational Level:
Advertising degree
Sallary:
R$ 2.500/m
Pains
Lacks patience with management apps;
Struggles to organize bills;
Complains about high bank fees and slow customer service;
Sometimes needs family help to pay rent;
Wishes to buy a house, but doesn't have enough money.
Painkillers
Intuitive and easy-to-navigate app;
Payment due date alerts;
Fee-free digital account, swift virtual assistance;
Expense management by category and checklist of paid bills;
Assistance in saving money and buying the house.
Validation
With the personas created, we started to create our hypotheses about the financial behavior of our audience.
Based on the research, it was natural to conclude that some scenarios were almost rights:
Brazilians, in general, do not have financial planning;
In most budgets, there is no money left after paying expenses;
People rarely keep money for an emergency or a personal goal.
This and other hypotheses were tested with a quantitative survey. After capturing 149 responses, we were able to analyze and even be surprised at how wrong we were:
90% of interviewed were doing some financial planning;
87% of respondents declared to have at least a little money left at the end of the month;
77% of respondents had a reserve of money.
After the research results, it was necessary to better understand the financial behavior of the interviewed, but also the behavior of real users of Banco Inter, so we conducted a qualitative survey with some of the respondents.
Before talking about the learnings from this stage, I just want to point out how nervous and excited I was in these first interviews, it was the first user interview of my career and I keep this memory with much affection.
Getting back to the data! 😅
After exploring the financial daily life of the interviewed more closely, we noticed that the real scenario was different from the sample collected in the quantitative survey, probably because were closed questions. By talking to 6 participants from the first survey, we were able to extract the following learnings:
In general, financial planning was doing manually, which generated a huge amount of work to track expenses, discouraging the interviewed to the point of giving up after a few months;
Banco Inter users did not use many other Bank features besides credit card and transfers;
Although they reported having a money reserve, respondents generally had difficulty saving money and reaching their financial goals;
When asked about the use of an app to make easier the management, most did not show interest, and few who had already used it declared not to feel comfortable sharing their financial data with third-party apps.
Ideation
After the research phase, it became clear that our efforts should be put into creating a solution that did not require repetitive effort from the user into add expenses, that was simple, intuitive, and that would make better use of the various resources offered by Banco Inter.
Time to roll up your sleeves and sketch out the first ideas!
Since we still had plenty of time and wanted to experience all stages of a project, we decided to conduct a usability test at this stage to validate our proposals. We embraced the truest UX cliché, "fail fast to learn fast".
The proposal was to give Inter users a view of everything that came in and went out during the month, mapping expenses through the use of the account, providing an area for them to create personal goals and set spending limits for the categories already existing on their credit card.
The tests were successful, and revealed only small points of improvement in some interactions on the home page. With this, the solution was evolved and the user flow was designed.
Prototyping
To padronize all screens, a style guide was created based on the identity already used by Inter in its application.
In this stage, I particularly had some difficulty, as Inter itself uses various design patterns for its products, creating some inconsistencies, so I chose to focus on the most recurring patterns and create a reduced version of the Style Guide used by the brand.
To carry out the final usability tests, the flow screens were evolved to high fidelity and then prototyped.
Usability Tests
As in the first test stage, we created a test script with some task for the users, and we followed a model of an interviewer and someone to listen carefully and take notes.
We tested our prototype with eleven people, divided in two different groups: one group for the expenses and earnings journey and the other for the goals and the month planning journey. As the firsts test, we were able to find some improvement points, so we were fixing the big problems and testing to refine the journeys.
Key Takeaways:
Rename and redesign the main card to help users to find our feature at the app’s homepage;
Refine the “Income” section, to make it easier for users to distinguish between received incomes to future incomes;
Adjust the copywriting of all flow to match with used terms from interviews during the tests and interviews.
After all changes, we had our solution for release, besides offer a simple planning system to the users, we also helped they achieve their objectives with investment tips based on their profile and give them products with cashback based on their personal goals.
The impact
Being a study project, the main positive impact was practicing and applying what we learn during the program, but we also had to present it for UX professionals that would judge our skills and work.
Max score on the project!! 😀
Certainty was a great sense of achievement and proud between the entire team. As my first experience in the area, it was a huge learning process. I was happy to try many frameworks and methodologies in a single project, there’s no doubt that helped me to define my design process that I still improve and use nowadays.
❤️ Made with love by Wellison Gonçalves