From a Designer’s Archives: Why UPI proved to be an Experience-Design Challenge
By: Konark Ashara
Tags: Upi, UX Design, Banking, Customer Experience, Fintech

Our journey with UPI in the pre-GPay Era

Back in early 2016, to most people in India, ‘UPI’ would probably sound like an abbreviation for a political party or a civil service examination! Today money transfer takes merely a few seconds thanks to Unified Payments Interface (UPI). However, before GPay/Tez or PhonePe became every person’s go-to new-generation banking app, or even before UPI became an overnight phenomenon — we, a design team working with an Indian bank, faced the task of designing an interface incorporating UPI.

What you read ahead is a retelling of our odyssey of designing an UPI-based application battling confusion, bewilderment, and hesitance of sailing into uncharted waters!

Wait, is it like Paytm? — our First Thoughts on UPI

As human minds go, drawing parallels is an initial reaction to a new concept. UPI sounded a lot like NEFT but much faster and without time constraints. Again, it was digital so naturally Paytm was a close comparison. But for all we knew, the fundamental technology was significantly different than all our previous mental references. The biggest roadblock was apprehending user response to an application based on a system which no one really understood.

Knowing how wary Indians can be about handling their money on a new digital platform or rather on anything out of the conventional box, the path for us loomed large with unfavorable possibilities.

NPCI had just launched the concept of UPI — a round-the-clock money transfer mobile application using a unique id. With quite a bit of obscurity in our minds, we headed out to design one of India’s first ever banking application for instant money transfer using UPI.

Money transfer or Social Network? — the WhatsApp Inspiration

With UPI, we realized, came a breakthrough in banking in the ‘pull’ concept for financial transactions. One can now enable collect requests or merely, ask money from the debtor in concern. A usual design project begins with user research as an initial phase. However, in our case, this was absent due to a lack of existing working knowledge of UPI. Thinking on our feet, we relied on the vast cultural diversity within our team to provide an idea about the user persona. Everybody brought to the table various differing notions of Indian sentiments when it came to monetary transactions. From our makeshift customer personas, we figured that one of the demands for money transfer was settling dues among friends & contacts. The previously tedious process of adding a beneficiary on net banking sites and making mental notes to transfer could now be a matter of past just like the slowly fading concept of liquidity. When the thought of contacts arose, a social angle crept in. The best way to engage users in a financial app was to make the experience as user-friendly as possible — to make it look and interact with as if a social messaging application. We designed a contact list where money is owed and a separate list where money could be “asked” — certain amounts that are due. With easy to access contact lists, our ‘WhatsApp’ analogy made this application much simpler and hassle-free.

The real Everest — retaining Customer Attention

One of the major hurdles for us to jump was the design of the on-boarding journey. It’s no surprise that a banking application would have several steps as a measure of registration. In this case, with the regulations of UPI, we figured there were 13 steps a user had to go through before starting any transactions. Adding individual user details, creating an account specific to the application, linking that identification to email-ids and mobile phones, and obviously adding bank details were important prerequisites.

Now, if someone has to go through those 13 steps right at the beginning, one might wander off the application either procrastinating or have second thoughts about instant money transfer altogether. As the client brought in their financial expertise talking through a technical POV, we brought to the table the user’s thinking. Experience design is primarily always putting ourselves into a consumer’s shoes. Even though we knew the registration for the UPI application was inevitable, we didn’t want to lose the customer right at the beginning of their journey.

The solution to this conundrum was a phasing device. The information was broken up into segments, and the sign-in process was split into parts so that the user didn’t have to go through the numerous steps all at once. Users would only have to fill-in initial details to get started and then eventually complete the other sections once they got comfortable with the app. By breaking down the registration process, the sign-up took up less than two minutes. The virtual payment address (VPA) gave the users the feel of opening an email account and the intended on-boarding process was to make it as simple as using Gmail.

Customer is always the King! — user-centric design

Our dogma of digital design has always been putting the user at the very center. Donning the consumer hat, we delve into the user’s mind and realize the choices made at every step understanding the psyche of the customer. As a forerunner for instant money transfer apps, this application had to educate the customers about the basic functioning of the payment system of UPI. And it had to be done in such a way that users don’t doze off right at the start. With icons and colorful backgrounds, the interface not only reflected the branding of the bank in question but also gave a visual appeal engaging the consumer eye.

Simplistic design speaks for itself and transcends deep into the consumer minds. The experience of an application should go beyond basic usability. Through this app, the intention was to build trust towards an alien concept and to give a sense of security since we were dealing with money here. Similar to the brand ideologies, through the application too, we tried to give the essence of interacting with a trusted friend for financial matters.

Solving customer problems has been one of the prime objectives of customer experience design. Instant money transfer not only makes customer lives easier but also provides a convenient alternative to several problems associated with other modes of fund transfer. To that end, we felt that the communication in the app had to be conversational and the interactions minimalistic. The fact that users do not need to have an account with the host bank factored in addressing any user reservations. Also, multiple bank accounts could be linked. Even for users with dual sim mobile phones, the application had a special feature to accommodate that.

UPI was Here to Stay

As compared to the big giants Google and PhonePe, this hybrid app is still quite nascent in its growth. However, with over 50k installations, the application was a fair indicator of the popularity of UPI, customers adopted the new system quite rapidly and created a market for instant money transfer applications. This felt like a testament to the notions we had set out with on this journey. Without user study and the lack of a strong benchmark, all we had was a belief about consumer behavior and a drive to create experiences to solve basic consumer problems.