Visa Digital Commerce App
Design lead for a team of 2 designers and 1 prototyper
2015 - 2016
Complete app refresh. Visa decides to rebuild a white-label mobile banking app product after moving development in-house in 2015. This app offers bank clients configurable features and turnkey customization. After a long journey of designing through business complexities, the "Visa Digital Commerce App” was launched in June 2016 on iOS and Android.
CHALLENGE
Experience hierarchy
The Visa Digital Commerce App is a customizable mobile banking app that served mid to small-sized US banks, where one product could deliver different experiences depending on its customization. The UX challenge was in defining the experience hierarchy that anchors the variances.
Upholding Visa’s strategy to shift users to pay with their phones in 2015, we decided to take a “wallet-first” approach where payments would anchor other configurable banking features. We applied this framework to decisions in UI layouts, visuals, interaction flows, and feature designs.
PROCESS
Card-based designs
With a wallet approach, we centered the app architecture on the user’s “cards," as opposed to “accounts” in banking convention. We believed this was a new kind of bank-wallet app that users can adopt through our designs. All configurable features appear or disappear from each card’s action menu, layouts contract and expand, and visual design and branding also took a similar modular approach. Combining this IA, app conventions, user research feedback, and ounces of creative magic, an app began to emerge.
Product launch video about the transformative power of design
OUTCOME
Endurance, partnership, and inspiration
After many business complexities, changing client requirements, and budget constraints, we launched the app in June 2016 on both iOS and Android platforms. The app offered 15 configurable features and enrolled 90+ participating banks (as of April 2019). I took away the importance of practicing endurance, unwavering partnership, and keeping my team inspired by what’s ahead—prototyping new features, getting users’ feedback, and telling stories of meeting customer needs through design.