Carbon
Improving the android & iOS app experience
Role
Senior Product Designer
I led the User Research for the project, Visual design implementation, Prototyping & testing for quality assurance.
Overview
Carbon empowers individuals with access to credit, simple payments solutions, high-yield investment opportunities and easy-to-use tools for personal financial management. A large percent of all transactions done by customers goes through the mobile apps and this makes the apps the major cash cow of the company.
Research and Problems
After consolidating the list of problems exposed by our data reporting tool (firebase, hotjar), and recurring complains from the customer care team, there was a list of problems that needed to be solved.
I interviewed a couple of customers (different tiers) and i quickly noticed a couple of things:
- A high percentage of users drop off during registration.
From a firebase report, it was clear that the drop-off point with the highest percentage is during the sign-up process. The dominant factor was the length of the form.
Note: After considering rules & guidelines set by the regulators that licensed the app’s functionalities and removing unnecessary fields during registration, the form was still long. - Loan breakdown is quite complex and mostly confuses users.
The customer success team gets a lot of complaints about the loan breakdown complexity and confusion over repayment terms. Users struggled with understanding the relationship between interest rates and payback amounts. , they also had no way of knowing the loan amounts they were eligible for which resulted in a lot of declined loan requests. - Asides from loans other products were performing below expectations.
The business wants to encourage users to frequently use its array of products and also make sure they are aware of most of what the company offers. - A proper transaction history.
The transaction history was limited – no proper categorization, filter, or sorting.
TLDR; The primary motive was to expose areas of friction during registration, loan applications, and also explore solutions aimed at increasing the performance of other products on the application.
Ideation
At this stage, I came up with a couple of ideas to solve these problems and make the application more usable for the customers. These ideas were mostly inspired by user experience best practices and initiatives that solved the same or similar problems in competitive products.
Here are some of the ideas:
- Include a progress bar during registration. This would create a clear path to completion, reduce a user’s uncertainty, inform the user about the need for each stage of the registration process and also reduce users’ perception of time.
- Inform user’s about the proper data to input to reduce errors and frustration.
- Provide clarity around the loan amount, repayment amount, interest rate and loan duration, thereby making it easier for users to make an informed decision about their loan.
- Include offer badges on other products to make it more attractive and also include an ordering feature that arranges products based on your most used products to encourage repeat transactions.
- Include as much metadata in the transaction history and also create a proper filtering system.
Design & Implementation
Wireframes
I focused mainly on the functionalities and flow, while also including some interface details to give more clarity to the purpose of each screen. This allowed me to rapidly test and improve my ideas before moving on to design the interface properly.
User Testing, Feedback & Iteration
I tested the wireframes with a different set of users and made a few notes which were largely reflected in the hi-fidelity designs.
some of the notes are:
- After registration, users want to be reminded of the email the verification link was sent to.
- cashback was a confusing term, clarification is needed during the loan process
Registration Flow
While testing the wireframes, most of the users were more patient and they felt safer with security badges that assured them of data-security.
The progress bar worked and it also gamified the experience, most users had an end in mind and unconsciously set out to reach the end of the form.
Loan Offer
A lot of users requested for customisation of their loan offers, so I made availability for choosing a specific amount based on how much could be offered to a customer.
The range is calculated based off the lowest amount that could be offered and the highest unique amount based on the customer’s credit profile.
Home and Transaction History
The offer badges caught the attention of the users and sparked an inqusitive idea.
Key Wins In summary
- Huge Reduction in drop-off during the registration process
- Reduced errors during registration
- increased loan application acceptance due to the flexibility in application
- Increased click rate on other products.