Overview

The VTB bank mobile app helps users accomplish typical finance operations such as: applying for a new card or loan, money transfer, payments, reviewing transaction history etc.

The British Higher School of Art and Design is one of the most important educational centers in Russia working in close partnership with the Faculty for the Creative and Cultural Industries of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and specializing in professional education in various creative fields.

I enrolled in the joint offline grant program of BHSAD and VTB bank as a design student willing to become a product designer and solve complicated online banking problems. The last month of our study was dedicated to finding the best solutions for the VTB banking app. The tasks were given by our course mentors. Together with two other designers we formed a team and chose to redesign the Payment screen.

My Growth

I was one of the 30 lucky ones who got selected from more than 350 participants for this fully paid program. During my study, I grew tremendously and gained valuable knowledge that I apply every day in my job. Though I had already worked as a UX UI designer at a digital agency, it was the beginning of my career and I grasped each information to develop these skills:

Challenges

Our team focused on one specific problem – there were too many (50) payment categories on a single (payment) screen that caused confusion and inability to find a necessary one. The bad user experience formed the main business problem – reduced transaction activity and conversion into other products (mortgages, loans, etc.).

But we decided to dig deeper to find the real problem there.

Defining the Problem

The Bank relied on the Daily banking concept because by performing daily operations in the app, users would've gotten used to the bank and could've gotten more mortgages and insurance in the future.

However, based on the data we gathered from the data team, VTB ranked only 8th (iOS) and 14th (Android) in the Daily Banking ranking of the best mobile banks because of the low level of convenience in making payments and transfers. But, according to a Delloite study in 2020, the convenience of services was among the top 3 factors that influenced the choice of a bank.

In terms of transaction activity, VTB also lagged behind the market: 51.5% versus 58.7%. For such routine activities as housing payment, utility services payment, and the Internet payment, the VTB mobile app’s performance was 3 times lower than the market.

Besides, the usability rate of the app from the users was considered as 2/5. Payments and transfers were among the top 5 main pain points for users.

Therefore, it was necessary to increase user penetration into different categories of payments and transfers, which would've brought VTB closer to the concept of Daily Banking, and, as a result, increased user loyalty.

Defining the
Target Audience

According to the data that we received from VTB, the main drivers of growth in the client base were corporate sales and mortgages. With the simplification of the transfer between different banks, a mortgage could no longer be a motivator for switching to a new bank.

We defined the following categories as the target audience for Payments and Transfers:

• Payroll clients.

• «A» segment – a family person with an above-average income, has many spending categories and leads an active lifestyle.

Interview &
User Testing

We conducted 20 interviews and found out the most popular payment and transfer categories among the bank users:

• Transfer by phone number

• Mobile payment

• Transfer between accounts

• Payment of utilities

• Topping up the card

Competitive Analysis

We accomplished a competitive analysis among 14 companies and found out the benchmarks:

• Payment and transfer screen customization

• Payment schedule settings

Job Stories

After collecting all the data, we created job stories for our target audience that would describe their typical ways of solving their problems.

Flow Chart &
CJM

We also created a Flow chart and a Customer Journey Map to understand the gaps in the flow and see the typical user’s behavior in the app.

Proposed
Solution

Based on the gained data, we proposed the following improvements:

• Payments autosaving to ease the performing of routine operations.

• Contextual onboarding to teach users how to keep all payments and transfers in one place.

• Subscriptions on all recurring payments to manage the budget in one place.

Hypothesis 1

Payment and transfer recommendation

• Recommending specific kinds of payments based on the user’s profile information and transaction history.

• The interview results showed that users highly valued personalisation as it made their lives much easier.

• Auto-saving transaction templates were implemented by all major VTB competitors, which indicated the relevance of the functionality for customers, and also indicated that users had such habits.

Hypothesis 2

Recurring payments in one place

• By having access to all user transactions, we could identify all recurring transactions and create an opportunity to work with them separately in the Payments section. So that a user controlled all the subscriptions by integration with the other apps.

• It was possible to make the Payments screen a hub for managing all the user's regular payments easily in a few clicks.

Hypothesis 3

Customizing the Payment screen

• We suggested adding the ability to manually customise the payment screen, so the user could arrange the elements to their liking: hide unnecessary categories, move necessary ones, create folders for their own needs.

• Manual customisation would have increased the personalisation of the screen and positively affect the retention rate.

Prototyping

We were given a restricted access to the VTB design system, so we created customized design components in our wireframes and used them in each scenario.

Testing

The results of 15 user testings proved our hypotheses on 85%, which we considered as success. The main insights we got:

• In reality, not many users wanted to customize the payment screen – they would have preferred to have a preset of functions which they could use without significant adjustment.

• Some users preferred to have some functions on separate screens because they were confused with how overloaded the screen looked with extra functionality.

My Challenges

Key Takeways

Further Story

When the course was finished, I was one of the 10 students who were selected to work at VTB Bank. I started my career as a product designer in a huge finance corporation and this experience was game-changing.