Problem Hypothesis

Jamaica National Bank has loyal customers throughout the the globe, which means a lot of their customers send money across borders - from other countries into Jamaica, and from Jamaica to other countries. However, the current remittance experience isn't designed for mobile and is very cumbersome on the web.

If JNB could release a mobile app that could compete with Wise, Paypal, MoneyGram, and others, they could keep their customer remittance experience in house, increasing customer satisfaction while also increasing revenue.

Key Pain Points

Poor mobile experience: the web based remittance application is clunky on mobile, requiring many users to log in on a PC to complete the task
Require an account: to even view the capabilities or estimate a send, users have to create an account first.
High barrier to entry: In addition to account creation, JNB asks for a lot of personal information and documentation before allowing users to even start a flow or explore remittance capabilities.This leads to burnout and churn.

Problem Confirmation

After listening to the customer share their needs and perceived issues, I proceeded to perform a competitive analysis against industry leaders in remittance and peer to peer payments.

I laid out all the key screens and flows from industry leaders. This allowed me to observe how industry leaders focused on user experience in layout, structure, user flows, and requirements.

Presentation

Next, I gathered the findings and presented them to the client.

This allowed us to align on what we're seeing and confirm the direction we want to proceed in conceptually and user experience-wise.

Key Findings

Allow access without account: most remittance apps, we discovered, allow their potential users to start the path of sending money without an account. This allows them to preview the app, in a sense, and gets users to start committing to action.
Bite size data requests: leading remittance apps asked users for their information mostly when needed/required to complete a task. This allows users to add their data in flow of creating a send request.
Low barrier to entry: we noticed that remittance apps allowed users to start each of the key actions from the first screen without yet being signed in.

Personas

After competitive research, I synced with the client product team on their target personas.

In this clients case, they didn't have available hard and fast data for their users available, so I had to rely on their anecdotes and descriptions of key demographics and experiences, and we came up with the following three personas.

It became clear through our discussions that we had to accommodate frequent senders, one-time senders, as well as non-tech savvy users.

Key User Flows - Low Fi

After getting the personas lined up and completing the competitive research, I worked on the sitemap to clarify the information hierarchy, as well as start some key lo-fi wireflows.

Design System

One of the keys for consistency and setting my clients up for success is the use of a design system. Even a minimal design system in a limited engagement can set a client and development team up for success.

In building out the design system, I ran different colors, font families, inputs, illustrations, and icons past the client.

This particular client wanted illustrations but did not want to hire an illustrator, so went with an open source illustration library and photo that was approved by the client.

In addition, by setting variables within Figma for colors, it was easy to design for both light and dark at the same time.

Final Designs

Final design delivery is always an iterative process.

After continuous meetings throughout the design process, and one final review, and prototyping the key flows, the final designs were delivered.

Additionally, instructions were provided for the development team on how to use Figma DevMode to analyze the designs, including plugins that assist in code generation.