Our client, an established digital payments provider in Europe, saw an opportunity for their digital wallet product in the emerging legalisation of online gambling in the US.
As a follow on to Part 1, we helped our client explore and visualise a new experience that covered multiple journey touchpoints from sign up in the payment gateway to using the app. The features conceptualised covered bringing the current experience to competitive parity and removing barriers as well as differentiating with budget and control features, all validated by research data.
3 months
The biggest challenge in this project was navigating the legal regulations uniquely placed on our client. Customers depositing into their digital wallet had to define if they were gambling or non-gambling funds. However the existing dashboard showed no differentiation of funds after deposit and the user could easily forget, try to make a gambling payment and be rejected by the gambling website. This initial question of funds intention was also quite jarring and caused some users to feel negatively towards the brand, like they were in trouble for considering gambling.
Our research showed users had a need to budget and keep their allocated gambling money seperate from everyday spend. Our client had a requirement that they ask users whether their funds were gambling or non gambling. As a solution to these, we created the concept of 'pockets'. Instead of one global balance, pockets behaved like accounts within the wallet that the user could name, personalise and most importantly, define as a gambling or non gambling account. This concept fit much closer with our audience mindset and no longer caused alarm.
Another interesting challenge was implementing budget control features into the digital wallet that could strike a balance between encouraging healthy spend and restricting spend. It was important from both an audience and a business perspective, not to recommended features that would restrict spend so harshly, the user no longer felt the money was in their control. After a lot of team discussion, we resolved that the budget feature should be akin to a friend reminding the user of how much they are spending and providing data visualisation to promote spending mindfulness.
This project was very well received by our client’s product team. I had the lucky opportunity to co-present our findings and recommended product experience with my manager to multiple, c-suite stakeholders. Our recommendations were taken into our clients product roadmap and are currently being designed, tested and built.
I joined 3 on-site workshops with our client and was a key part of preparation, documentation and support during exercises. I also joined regular client catchups and presented works to gain buy-in from senior stakeholders.
As part of executing the experience re-design and executive summary deliverables, I coordinated 3 UI designers at different stages of the design and maintained a project plan.
I was the lead on translating ideas into testable features on wireframes and prototypes created in Adobe XD. These were validated with guerrilla testing and results from client-based user testing.
This project helped me understand how incredibly valuable it is to speak to the people we are designing for. As someone who has a close family member who has struggled with gambling, this project made me initially uncomfortable. However it was incredibly enlightening to hear the stories of people who enjoyed sports, games and gambling and their various, homemade control methods to help them engage in betting safely.
Understanding the mindsets and habits helped me see the great opportunity for a payments brand to be an advocate of healthy gambling and enable gamblers to enjoy what they do without serious consequences.
