Moving money around is the backbone of every banking app - whether you’re transferring from one account to another, paying bills, or sending money to a client.
While Azlo, a small business bank, was pushing the bounds of a traditional banking experience and building simple financial management tools for entrepreneurs, its money movement experience and code base had largely remained the same since inception. New features were being injected as micro-experiences without considering the macro-system.
This created a web of tech debt, limitations in the UI, and inconsistencies in the way money movement engaged with other pieces of the product.
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Over the course of 3 months, we set out to simplify money movement and define interaction patterns and components that would scale in directions we knew the product was headed. It was important that we didn't try to solve future design problems, but rather make the space for them to grow into.
We broke the initiative into four phases: Problem Definition, Ideation, Validation, and Storytelling for Impact.
Working closely with the payments Product Manager and Developers who were domain experts in the historical money movement experience, we defined goals of the project, success metrics, and technical limitations.
Once we captured all of the knowns about the experience’s problems and needs, we moved through exercises in competitive analysis, heuristic analysis, stakeholder interviews to hone in on 3 key problem areas:
Everything was being communicated in modals... Which, of course, led to modal fatigue. After a certain point, users don't even register a modal on the screen before their subconscious does whatever it can to dismiss it. Popups - that's what we're trained to do.
This led to users missing critical information about transactions, and often resulted in increased Customer Support calls to cancel.