I See!
3 months | Feb-Apr 2018
Project I See! is a research project to understand how the visually-impaired community use e-payment mobile applications for monetary transactions. After conducting real user research and analysis, our team decided to focus on maximizing efficiency for applications with sensitive information and potentially costly errors for visually impaired through the creative use of shortcuts and informative artifacts in e-payment applications.
Role: UX Research | UI Designer
Tools: Figma
Design Methods: Persona, Customer Journey Mapping, User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, User Flow, Sitemaps, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing
Design Process
Heuristic Evaluation
In order to understand the current state of mobile payment interface for the blind, we conducted heuristic evaluation on Grabpay and DBS Paylah!’s user interface and features. We blindfolded ourselves and attempted to complete various tasks in the application. Although this is not 100% representative of the actual users, this have helped us identify many gaps in the current application.
| DBS Paylah! | Grabpay | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview of the application | DBS PayLah! is a personal mobile wallet which allows the user to perform fund transfers via a mobile number. | GrabPay is a mobile wallet payment solution through the Grab phone application for users to make payments to contacts, for Grab services and for in-store purchases. |
| Feature 1: Pay money to friends | Limitations: The user needs to click on each individual field after filling in the text fields (Amount, Payee and Message). For the visually impaired, there is a high chance that they will miss out one or two fields when interacting with the screens. |
Limitations: Users find it very hard to send the money over to their friends. Because when the accessibility feature is activated, the user has to try different gestures to send it. In this case, user needs to swipe to send using two fingers. Inconsistent UI element. |
| Feature 2: Pay bill to organization | Limitations: The user needs to return to the homepage to select the category of organization (Telcos, Utilities, Taxes, Town councils etc.) to pay to organization. This increase time taken to interact and select the right organization to pay as the visually impaired user need to swipe/hover over all the buttons on the main content page. |
Not Applicable as Grabpay do not have Pay Bill to organization feature. |
User Analysis
Stage 1: PayLah Questionnaire
This survey seeks to find out the most frequently used features of the existing PayLah application. We chose 56 sighted users as a preliminary understanding before we interview the visually impaired users.
| Pay to multiple contacts | Everyday Payments Section | Manage button | Inbox button | History tab | Discover tab | Recent contacts | Favourite bill organizations | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average usefulness | 3.1 | 2.4 | 3.7 | 2.1 | 3.4 | 1.2 | 4.3 | 4.2 |
Based on the survey results, majority of our users find the “Recent Contacts”, “Favorite Bill Organization”, and “Manage Button” to be the most useful features. Our team decided to focus on improving two features – peer to peer (P2P) payment and bills payment.
Stage 2: User Interviews
User 1 – Mr. Chong Kwek Bin
Age: 34
Age of blindness onset: Born partially blind (Congenital Blindness)
Degree of Blindness: Partially blind, uses Android talkback feature the most and looks closely to the screen to see the UI elements
Job Scope: Blind IT Support and Training staff in Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH)
Experience with Technology and Mobile Devices: Android user. Very experienced in both iOS, Android and Windows operating system.
Screen Reader Profile: Intermediate screen reader user (between Novice and Expert)
Cognitive Ability: Quick adaptation to new and unfamiliar UI and screens through observing and some extent of trial and error.
Attitude and Motivation: Highly motivated individual who teaches other students how to use technology. Positive attitude and willing to share his knowledge and experiences with us so that we can gain awareness of the problems that the visually impaired users face.
User 2 – Giang
Age: 26
Age of blindness onset: Born blind (Congenital Blindness)
Degree of Blindness: Fully blind
Job Scope: Accessibility developer for Android for Grab application Experience with Technology and Mobile Devices: iPhone user. Very experienced in both iOS and Android. Very adaptive and willing to learn and cope with new technologies and applications.
Screen Reader Profile: Expert screen reader user
Cognitive Ability: Able to adapt and interacts with new applications that may be complex through trial and error by going through every element on the screen.
Attitude and Motivation: Highly motivated individual who came to Singapore to work from Vietnam. Positive attitude and willing to share his knowledge and experiences with us.
User 3 – Eugene
Age: 21
Age of blindness onset: Born partially blind (Congenital Blindness)
Degree of Blindness: Partially blind, uses a physical magnifier, on-screen magnifier and sometimes screen reader
Job Scope: Student
Experience with Technology and Mobile Devices: Android user. Struggles with iOS. Very willing to learn and cope with new technologies and applications.
Screen Reader Profile: Novice screen reader user
Cognitive Ability: Interacts with new applications that may be complex through trial and error by going through every element on the screen. Understand how the UI of the application looks like by asking someone to describe to him.
Attitude and Motivation: Positive attitude to learn a new interface with attempts to ask others to explain the UI to him for the first time.
Conceptualisation
Specific feedback obtained from users
- Steps required during the PayLah payment process was repetitive and inefficient especially because they often pay to the same people in their contacts
- Users are required to go through numerous trials and error to try and understand the layout of the PayLah homepage and the payment processes
- Users like the recent contacts and favourite organizations feature and felt that this process could be further improved to streamline the number of steps to reach the goal
We found that users place the most priority on efficiency and low error rates. As such, we have defined the meaning of efficiency and error rate in the context of our project below.
Measuring efficiency
Efficiency is defined by the amount of time taken to complete pre-defined tasks from start to end, without any guidance.
Measuring error rates
Error impact is defined as the amount of time that major errors delay a user in his completion of task. We chose this as a metric of measurement because blind interfaces are error prone in the first place, and we chose to focus on the major payment errors that causes user frustrations.As such, we conceptualized our designs around the concept of providing shortcuts and provide more informative feedback.
Wireframe for Peer-2-Peer
Wireframe for Bills Payment
Prototyping
High-Fidelity prototype for P2P and bill payment feature
