Design Thinking Exercise
One paragraph background info on the company as an introduction
Whole Bank is looking to add a feature to their mobile app that allows for mobile payments to be used when traveling aboard.
This feature should activate when once they land in their destination, it can be easily detected by looking for credit card transactions that involve them booking a flight or with GPS detection from the users’ phones. Ideally the mobile payment will be widely accepted by many vendors internationally.
The main problems you found when you interviewed users
One issue I found when interviewing international travelers is that they only use their credit card for booking flights and living accommodations. Because there is always uncertain on whether shops, taxis, and cafes take their credit card, 4/5 interviewees frequently take out a sum of cash upon arrival in which they spend throughout the trip. However banks then to vary in popularity in different countries, it is not always guaranteed that you can find your bank abroad, and other banks will charge you a transaction fee. One interviewee said he took out a one time withdrawal and kept all his cash on him for the entire trip. This would make him susceptible to robbery.
What is the main problem that you are trying to solve
The biggest hurdle in implementing mobile payments to get merchants to accept them. A problem we have today, some places accept Apple Pay, some accept Android’s NFC Google Play, and etc. Having a well designed system is only as useful as it’s adoption rate.
How you planned to solve this problem
Mobile payments have really taken off in China because it leverages off the popular chat platform WeChat. The app is widely available across different mobile platforms. Merchants only have to implement a single solution, although many do also accept other forms of mobile payment, such as Alibaba Pay. Lessons learned from WeChat mobile payments is that Whole Bank’s mobile payment solution should be one that is widely accessible to both customers and merchants. Banking on the faith that cafes, taxis, and shops will implement a solution to accept Whole Bank’s mobile system is a far reach. The solution we implement will have to address the current state of our world, and how different countries economies operate today. Banks are always a good way to get cash, if there is no transaction fees that would be idea. If Whole Bank can form partnerships with international banks and waive or reduce fees, it would make spending money during travels easier.
With additional features to Whole Banks’s existing app:
Get Alice Q’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
- Screen with map of surrounding Whole Banks, partnered banks, and just banks.
- In the ATM, implement a NFC identification system that allows people to withdraw cash without their bank card.
This way, people can withdraw smaller sums of cash through ATMs at banks, throughout their trip.
Photos of your paper prototype design
Share a few key things that you learned throughout this process
This process tell me that sometimes the problem you set out to solve, may not be a problem that is currently solvable without having to solve many other problems at a larger scale. At glance the goal of this project is to “make mobile payments feature for international travel”, however because how inconsistent is the adoption rate of electronic payment across the world, I will likely be very much implementing the solution that has low adoption rate and will be rarely useful to travelers. I must dig deeper into our problem to find the root motivation of the problem. The more abstract goal is that we want to make Whole Banks users, be easily able to spend money abroad. Giving them a reliable and easy way to access Whole Bank branches, partnered banks, and other ATMs will be more reachable objective, and thus implementing the map feature will give them access to that.
