Personal Loans Innovation

Prototype and usability testing for Westpac, Australia’s second largest bank

Overview

The problem

Sales of personal loans were decreasing. Westpac had several concepts for apps they could make to fix it, but hadn’t done much testing or validation to make sure the ideas would work.

What I did

Over four weeks I translated their three favorite concepts into prototypes, tested them with users and refined them to make them much more likely to succeed.

The outcome

We discovered several critical flaws or hidden assumptions that made some of the concepts much less practical than Westpac had considered. Conducting in-depth user testing like this early in the process probably saved our client hundreds of thousands of dollars in building a product on faulty foundational assumptions.

Skills

User FlowsWireframesInteraction designPrototypingUsability testing

Team

2 product designers working client side

Process

Define

We were provided with several concepts that had been created from previous research and ideation sessions and asked to weave them together into a prototype or series of prototypes. The main idea that flowed throughout the whole thing was having the ability to accurately calculate a user's borrowing capacity and how this could then be useful to them.

We were given high-level concepts and asked to make them into realistic prototypes to test their worth. Below is an example of the concepts we were given to work with.

Prototype

I worked with the stakeholders to flesh out the concepts into meaningful flows that I then converted into high-level wireframes. With the stakeholders aligned on these, the other designer and I worked to create high fidelity prototypes. The following screens are a selection of those developed for testing.

Testing Outcomes

The prototypes were fairly successful with users. However, our testing revealed some serious concerns. Two of the concepts relied on users sharing all their banking data, from across all their different bank accounts, with our client bank. This was polarising, to say the least.

About half the users we tested with were horrified by the idea of consolidating their financial data in a single bank, and the other half thought it was brilliant. Without this consolidation, accurately calculating a user’s borrowing capacity is not possible.

Most interestingly, there was no obvious correlation between age, sex, gender or anything else we could think of and a user’s level of concern about their privacy.

Take Aways

I’m a passionate believer in the value of prototyping. In the case of these prototypes we discovered several critical flaws or hidden assumptions that made some of the concepts much less practical than our client had considered.

On the one hand, none of these concepts will likely make it into the real world but on the other hand, conducting in-depth user testing like this early in the process probably saved Westpac hundreds of thousands of dollars on building a product on faulty foundational assumptions. I consider that to be a win, even if there’s no app to show for it.