RBC Design Sprint

BrainStation and RBC provided us a design sprint challenge to build and test a prototype, a desktop marketing website and a presentation for "Figo Bank".

We created a mobile app, Figo for young millenials to help manage shared living expenses with friends and loved ones. It helps maintain transparency on how expenses are divided by removing the confusion on who owes who and giving the users confidence to stay on top of their expenses.

I helped with the research, user interviews and testing, sketching ideas, asset collection, stitching together the prototype and creating the marketing website. 

Project
Design Sprint by RBC and BrainStation in 5 days

My Role
UX Researcher, Asset Collection, Stitching Prototype, Marketing Website Design

Team
Pauline Chin, Wynnie Chung, Zara Jillian

Tools
Pen & Paper, Figma, Sketch, InVision

Platform
iOS

Problem Space and Research

The design challenge was to create a native mobile app that provides a value that uniquely speaks to one of the target customer types for "Figo Bank". We were also given project constraints such as the chosen brand colours, font and business requirements. We were also tasked to provide a marketing desktop website.

We dived right into research where we found that:

30% of adults in US and Canada live with either a roomate or parent¹
94% of millenial couples discuss their finances "at least once a week"²
40% of millenial couples fight over finances "at least once a week"²

We decided to focus on millenial working professionals, living with others and who are "tech efficient" and focus on this design question:

How might we help young millenials present shared living expenses accurately so that there is clarity and trasnparency in expense composition and distribution within a household?

User Interviews

We interviewed four users on their thoughts and interactions with mobile banking, how they divide shared living expenses, if they used any banking apps for splitting payments to identify any pains and frustrations as well as opportunities.

From the interviews, we gathered key research insights:

Honour System promotes positive relationship 
Transparency through open communication
Creating Paper Trails and Tangible Plan of Actions for missed/late payments
Check-in through glances and overviews instead of detailed review

Persona

User Journey and Task Flow

The User Journey Map shows how Jake starts living with his roomates → disagreements occur on how the living expenses are divided → receipts are shown to each other → eventually a concensus is agreed and payments are made. From this map, we can start identifying opportunities to help ease this process for Jake and his roommates. It's important we help establish transparency for everyone and maintain clarity in the shared expenses to help maintain their relationships with one another. 

The Task Flow shows a detailed flow of events using the Figo app. It starts off with Jake in the app creating a Group with his roomates → Jake adding his expenses to the Group → Jake selects Expense Distribution where expenses are distributed equally → Jake sends the expenses to others in the Group for approval.

User Testing

Thanks again to my teammate, Zara who created the wireframes and hi-fis while the rest of us helped with the user testing. We conducted five user testing with our wireframe through online video chat.  

After we took their feedback (See below), we focused on making our hi-fis where we had some design constraints to follow such as using Avenir as a primary font, and the brand colours chosen:  #C8E9F8, #53BF85, #FE6955, #55575A, #F8F6F6, #ABECC9. And making sure it is WCAG compliant.

Good

Would use on a daily basis

Tasks are easy and straightforward

UI and hierarchy is clear and simple

Bad

Confusion with the colour status bar

Flow of user’s actions is unclear (who was paying?)

More clarity and concise language needed

Need to Consider

Condensing information to what users really value

More emphasis on the percentage and divided values for each member

Additional categories in the expenses page
Alarm reminders and notifications

Prototype

You can follow along Jake's journey as he does the following tasks in the app:

1. Create a new group account.

2. Add Rent as a new expense item for the group.

3. Distribute the rent expense between the group members.

4. Go through your expenses.

Marketing Website

I created the marketing website for desktop viewing where Jake can discover and learn more about Figo. It helped highlight the main features of our app, what it does and putting emphasis on "Sign Up," because it was a business requirement to focus on signing up rather than signing in as well. 

Reflections

This was a fun and educational design sprint to partake in. Thanks to RBC for providing us with the task and mentors who gave us really good advice and help. Although it was just five days and very hectic, I am definitely amazed and appreciative at what we all had accomplished. Thanks again to Zara, Wynnie and Pauline for being awesome teammates!

Considerations for the future:

Facilitating IOUs from missed or late payments 
Payment options between group members and expenses
Option to view weekly, monthly payments
Budget Planning feature
Tracker on spending habits of fixed and variable expenses



References
¹ CBC, 2016; Zillow, 2017
² TD Bank, 2019