Niyo Bharat App 📱
Overview
A banking app for blue-collar workers for accessing financial services.
Niyo Bharat, is a fintech platform which facilitates opening of zero balance salary accounts for blue-collar workers which offers unlimited fund transfers and multilingual mobile app for easy financial access to its users.
Problem statement
The then existed Bharat app was an outcome of the internal team hackathon at Niyo, which was developed by the in-house team for few mobile banking funtionalities which was made publically avaialble on playstore. But the app had minimal considerations for UX and the end users. Since Niyo was planning for second round of funding, with focus on blue collared user segement, it was decided to rewamp the existing app alognwith many other action items.
Few major design considerations were:
- ■ Need to roll out the redesigned app with in 6months timeframe
- ■ Identify and remove the exisitng UX issues and make it at par with other market players for same user segment, NO fancy UI (e.g. CRED)
- ■ Need to onboard more users, with increased app usage
- ■ Should be addressing key main pain points for basic banking for the TG (Check balance, PTP FT, Card block/Unblock etc.)
My Roles and responsibilities
- ■ Owned the product design independently, managing the product from planning research > app design > user testing.
- ■ Conducted design worshops with PMs, developers and researchers to build product and user understanding
- ■ Conducted bi-weekly stakeholder meetings to get buy-in from the business team and founders
- ■ Took part in customer care calls to understand the user's pain points
- ■ Conducted face to face interviews with the blue-collared workers, on field and in house research efforts.
Proposed solution
Basis of the existing app infrastructure and the timeline considerations, it was proposed to do an iterative enhancement of the Niyo Bharat app (android only). For this various stakeholders were consulted and buy-in was taken to support the following features as the practical solution (back then) i.e. to redesign the app to reflect the contemprary UX as compared to other players for the blue collared user segment(NBUs).
🏷️ Salient Features
- ■ Permanent salary account, even on changing jobs
- ■ Most secure account in the industry with lock/unlock/block card options
- ■ Instant account activation
- ■ Instant money transfer to any account
- ■ One click transfer to other Niyo accounts
- ■ Manage beneficiaries at the tip of your fingers
- ■ 10 vernacular languages to bring services closer to you
- ■ View passbook, download custom statements
- ■ Voice assist feature that can be switched on/off
Design changes
A complete overhaul of the UX was proposed to the existing Bharat app, making sure that the existing app backend infrastructure can be re-used and with minimal
code changes. Doing this a lot of design choices were made and discarded, and in this process there were more than 40+ screens were designed.
Here are the comparative screenshots of few important screens' before and after redesign efforts.
Home page
Passbook statements
Manage cards
Other features: video playlist (Official)
Results: Impact on business
Key Learnings
Learnt making quick prototypes using Adobe XD to get buy-ins from founders and other stakeholders as it helps to get detailed feedback.
Voice assisted feature, even though it looks novel & marketable but may not be the correct solution for the targeted users.
Infinite scroll vs card layout designs, which to use when.
Discovered new Micro interactions for entering Card Last 4 digits, long press indicator micro-interaction, Voice assist toggle feaure.
Managed the delivery timeline with the help of a small team of collaborators for the timely execution of all the design deliverables and developer handoffs.
