Money
Manager
Client: Standard Bank Group (Stanbic IBTC Bank) has over 175 branches across Nigeria with 2.4 million customers, and it offers a wide range of financial products and services to individuals and businesses.
🏢 Multinational
👩🏽💻👨🏽💼 ~6000 People
Background
The money manager product was tailored to address the financial management needs of bank customers, providing them with comprehensive tools to track their expenses, gain insights into their spending patterns, and take control of their finances.
Personal finance management has emerged as a key feature that modern users seek in their banking platforms.
Customers are increasingly gravitating towards banks that extend beyond basic transaction services and empower them to make informed financial decisions, enhancing their overall financial well-being.
How it Works
The bank's mobile app seamlessly integrates a money manager module, empowering customers to actively manage their finances. Upon logging in, customers can effortlessly establish their budget by assigning specific amounts to various spending categories.
The module automatically tracks and categorizes both mobile app and card transactions, streamlining the expense management process. Each expense is deducted from the designated budget amount, with real-time progress displayed on the app's user-friendly interface.
This comprehensive financial management tool empowers customers to make informed financial decisions, stay on top of their spending habits, and achieve their financial goals.
Low-Fidelity Sketches
To ensure seamless alignment with user requirements, I commenced by translating user stories gathered from the business analyst into visual representations using sketches. These sketches provided a tangible medium for early feedback from the business analyst, facilitating a thorough review and confirmation of alignment with the initial requirements.
By annotating the sketches with feedback insights, I effectively reduced the need for future revisions and streamlined the subsequent high-fidelity prototyping process. This proactive approach enabled efficient design iterations and ensured that the final product met the specified user needs and expectations.
High Fidelity Testing
Recognizing the nature of the money manager feature in shaping customer behavior, I strongly advocated for initiating usability testing prior to any development efforts. This proactive approach would enable us to gain valuable insights from a customer-centric perspective, ensuring that the product aligns with their preferences and expectations.
Leveraging the capabilities of ProtoPie, a prototyping tool that facilitates real-time user interaction, calculations, and response generation, I successfully developed a functional prototype. This prototype served as a valuable tool for conducting usability testing, allowing us to observe how users interacted with the product and identify areas for improvement before investing significant time and resources into development.
I and the business analyst on the project went out to 4 different branches of the bank to engage the bank customers. We asked them probing questions about their spending habits, and how they track their expenses.
We then gave them a brief overview of the budgeting tool and asked them to try creating a budget using the prototype I created.
User Feedback
Field usability testing provided us with some valuable feedback from the bank's customers.
1
Removal of the ‘goal section’.
While watching customer behaviour during the tests we noticed that this section left them confused about the money manager.
Most users where expecting in depth investment features with we didn’t cater to yet in this version of the app. We removed this menu totally and users had a more frictionless budget setup.
2
Start budget CTA not obvious enough.
A user pointed out that start budget button wasn’t obvious enough because it got lost in the sea of blue. I updated this to make the button more visible.
3
Users struggling with calculations.
A couple of users had difficulties knowing the exact amount they had left to allocate to their budget. This meant they had to do some extra arithmetic to set up their budget.
I fixed this by adding a line showing how much they had left to allocate and making the modal sticky, this would automatically deduct any amount they had allocated already and allow them to have a view of what is left while allocating amounts to other categories.
This update helped the users complete the task faster with less cognitive load.