High Fidelity Prototype
The Challenge
In 2021, the UAE banking industry was still struggling to deliver a digital-only banking experience that serves customers from the comfort of their own home. E-signature is not central bank approved so people had to go to brick-and-mortar bank branches in order to complete their onboarding and open an account.
As part of building the first digital-only bank in the UAE, onboarding customers was our main challenge. The product is implemented for both Android, iOS and Web systems but onboarding is executed strictly on mobile because of the technological limitations on the web (e.g. the need for a camera to scan documents).
Reinventing Account Opening in the UAE
In order to open a bank account in the UAE, a customer must go personally to a bank of his choice with his identification papers and sign up for all the services he wishes to use. With the rise and success of banks like Revolut and N26, the traditional banks’ onboarding felt too demanding and time consuming. Customers are in need of different solutions.
The main concern of the user is the inability to understand and follow up on the procedure of opening an account in a fully digital journey. In this case study I am discussing the process I led to create the onboarding experience of MBank as part of the whole digital-only bank project. The Solution is fast, transparent, keeps the user in control and informed.
My role was to...
Understand and identify the target users
Interview people who live and work in the UAE and understand their concerns
Define the user’s pain points
Define the onboarding user journey with all of it’s technical integrations and limitations
Facilitate brainstorming and problem solving workshops with the project stakeholders and the design team
Design the overall experience (user experience and interface)
The process
Every design decision made was validated and led by our understanding of the user and his behaviour. I led the user research activities for this project alongside the marketing team. I interviewed people who worked and lived in the UAE to understand their concerns and bring their voice to the table while discussing the solution.
Personas
According to the people I spoke with...
User Empathy Map
💬 What do users say?
I want banking to be easy and fast
I want to do everything online
I don’t understand the process
I like the traditional way
I don’t trust the online system with money
🤳 What do they do?
Go to the bank
Present their papers and personal information
Meets in-person with banker
Execute all of the banking operations on a mobile app in parallel
🤔 What do they think?
I don’t know how to work with the online banking
Online onboarding is possible
The steps to open a bank account are obscure and lengthy
I need my bank to be transparent
I want to understand and know the fees I have to pay
😮💨 What do they feel?
Annoyed with all the paper work and procedures
Lack of trust towards digital-only banks
Open for the opportunity of trying digital-only banks
Fear caused by the lack of information around digital banking
The Competition
What other banks were doing at the moment?
I looked at other digital banks’ onboarding so I can benchmark my experience and exceed the expectations of my target users. Observing the market allows me to have a clear visibility of what is already done and inspires me to find new opportunities in the user experience.
The User Journey
The user journey needs to be as fast and seamless as possible. How to reach this goal when we have 3 systems integrated (Core Banking, FOO Digital Bank, CRM) in addition to loads of boring forms to fill and central bank obligations. We need to keep the user informed, in control and entertained. The user journey consists of 5 steps influenced by the offline onboarding experience.
Client Signature
We tackled all the issues and we still have one more step to achieve. The banking laws in the UAE do not allow an account to be activated without a client’s physical signature. A lot of effort is being made to overcome this issue but in the meantime, our touchpoint with the customer is the card delivery system. While delivering a card the customer needs to sign papers that will allow his account to be legally activated.
A separate delivery platform was also designed for tablets to be used by the card delivery person
The Pre-Onboarding
The pre-onboarding is a necessary step in this flow. It informs the user of the possibilities and affordances of the platform and gives him an incentive to start!
In addition, this step allows the user to change the preferred language from the beginning and/or login directly if he is already an onboarded customer.
The Feedback Loop
This screen is an example that is reflected in every part of the onboarding flow. The user gets direct feedback and is well informed of the steps he needs to accomplish in order to fix any error if emerged while filling his information.
Tracking
The user wants to be in full control of the experience. Transparency is key and it allows the user to understand where he stands in the process and how much is left for him to start banking. In addition, we added a header tracker in every step.
The Design System
A successful experience is one that is consistent in shapes and forms. We built a design system to help us scale the platform in the future and ensure consistency of our components and UI elements. Throughout the mobile and web experience, this design system is a guide for designers and developers. It allows us to explain, maintain and improve all design elements throughout all platforms.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Multiple iterations were made in order to reach the best solution for our target users. Testing the low to high fidelity prototype with the users is essential, It allows to point out any misleading areas in the experience and fix accordingly before moving forward to the implementation and delivering a product that does not exceed the expectations.
High Fidelity Interactive Prototype
The prototype was tested in an official setup with 20 users until saturation was reached.
Final Thoughts
Users can now register and open a bank account in 5 to 6 minutes in a happy scenario. An itegration with an identity validation system called UAE PASS was made and the onboarding time decreased to 4 minutes to the UAE PASS users.
Finally, our team was successful in reaching the market as the first fully digital bank in the UAE. The target was to reach 1000 successfully onboarded users in 30 days after the launch. More than 2000 users were successfully onboarded by that time (15% conversion rate) which exceeded the client’s expectations. The next step is analyzing users feedback and data, as It will introduce new problems and edge cases to solve in order to optimize the onboarding experience and improve conversion rate.
