MARCH–AUGUST 2015
ATM machines are available at every street corner in the city, but it’s the opposite for those who live in a small town. Additionally, the daily withdrawal limit per machine is generally lower than the amount our customers needed to withdraw. By partnering with Walmart and Ria, we provided a cost-saving, convenient and secure way for users to withdraw their money at their stores nationwide.
COMPANY
PLATFORM
Phone & Tablet (iOS, Android), Web
MY ROLE
Lead designer guided a team of visual designer, project manager, content strategist, and creative technologist
Our team worked closely with a cross-functional team of 20 plus stakeholders from Ria, Walmart, marketing, product management, technology, business development, legal, compliance, and risk. I led all phases of design including research, service design blueprint creation, user testing to legal review, and collaboration with Walmart and Ria representatives to ship the product.
After being briefed about this project, there was a big question mark hanging above my team—why are we doing this? What is the unique experience we can provide to our users? To gain some clarity, we went out to two Walmart locations to experience the current money transfer services they offered. We observed and spoke to both the shoppers and store representatives and experienced the environment firsthand.
We used the insights and the technical research on the API to create an insightful service blueprint. We plotted out the key service moments where we anticipate the occurrence of customer pain points. Those are the moments where we could make a positive impact on the experience. With such a diverse group of stakeholders, this service blueprint, alongside a logic map, is useful for vision alignment and making sure their needs and concerns are addressed.
There were conflicting views on where this feature should exist in our web and mobile experience. Our marketing and products team preferred having this cash pickup feature to live under “Send Money.” However, from our research study and user interviews, we knew users viewed this as a money withdrawal alternative when they didn’t have access to in-network ATMs, or they wanted to bypass the lower daily withdrawal limit. I facilitated a cross-team discussion by presenting research findings and sitemap proposals.
We ideated on different user touchpoints presented in the service blueprint and explored design directions to:
We held multiple user testing sessions during ideation and received valuable inputs, which helped us refine our design and guided us in making design decisions. We were lucky to have a front-end developer in those sessions, where we could modify and update the code in response to user feedback, and test out other approaches on the fly.
The biggest challenges of this project were the changing requirements and new information from our partners and product team. We constantly had to work around those constrains, especially the ones from legal and compliance teams—since money transfer service is highly regulated by the federal government. There were many lessons learned about communication and producing the right artifacts to move the project forward.