THE PROBLEM:
Bank Of Baroda is a regional bank with operations across India catering to a homogenous user base. However, a large majority of the user base is located in rural India and smaller towns where there are fewer physical branches of the bank. Due to lack of financial literacy in rural India, the users mainly visit the bank's physical branch for their needs.
However, as COVID- 19 made physical branches of banks shut down to avoid physical contact and crowding in queues, the rural audiences were severely affected as they could not visit the branch for queries, investments and financial advise. The internet banking platform for wealth management has too much cognitive load for users who do not understand how wealth management works. Among a team project of re-vamping the entire website, my role aimed at re-designing the interaction of BOBCAPS- Bank of Baroda's wealth management platform for capital investments across web and mobile platforms, so as to explain the concept of wealth management and reduce cognitive load for rural users.
The current platform contains too much detailed information of the process in large text blocks which cause cognitive load for users. The communication contained complex imagery and idiomatic phrases like "key to..." along with complicated phrases in the micro-copy which cause miscommunication when translated to regional languages. After considerable user research of why the Wealth Management platform does not meet the needs of rural users, the following pressure points and insights were found to attain an 'Objective' to achieve in the re-designed interaction of the platform.
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN:
As per the above research and insights, the users in rural areas lacked 'purpose' of managing their finances through BOBCAPS wealth management due to lack of financial literacy.
The idea was to give rural users a 'purpose' to invest and simplify for them how wealth management benefits them by helping them achieve their goals, without any miscommunication or cognitive load in understanding the process. As a result, instead of large blocks of written information, the entire interaction was re-designed as a 'goal-based investment' platform for wealth management.
The following User Journey Map and Task flow were designed to ensure that the rural users understand the purpose of wealth management drive them to invest in their goals. In order to avoid crowding, The "Call For Assistance" function was designed to empower users to seek financial advice from a designated coach at any point in process
USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
MODIFYING WEB CONTENT AND ACCESSIBILITY 2.0 GUIDELINES TO MEET THE CHALLENGE OF REGIONAL FONTS:
The first challenge was that the rural users often used the translate function to read the instructions in Devnagari script. Devnagari fonts are way different from Roman fonts when it comes to letter construction,, ascenders, descenders, spacing and the way they way each word is read. As the brand guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 do not take into account how legibility is affected in Devnagari fonts causing miscommunication of information when the kerning, word-spacing and line-spacing is tampered with, new font guidelines had to be designed for the Devnagari adapts of the platform.
The images below demonstrate the challenge of with Devnagari fonts and how the problem was solved:
Cutting down the large scrolls of text , sorting them into different screens, simplifying information and instructions into neat sections, maintaining a clearer visual hierarchy, higher contrast between foreground and background, increasing the size of clickables for clarity across mobile and web screens, simplifying the micro-copy to avoid miscommunication in translations, using simple colour schemes and visual language of the brand etc played a vital role in reducing the cognitive load of each function by about 60-65%.
Reducing the cognitive load was imperative in this project since the Banking & Finance sector deals with money and hence nothing can be left to chance or mislead the user in the steps of interaction.
SEQUENCE OF INTERFACES (FULL PROCESS):
*Please Note: The screens and the interactive prototype below are the English translations uploaded for better understanding and convenience to universal users.
CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE:
To interact with the clickable prototype, Click this link: https://xd.adobe.com/view/6dbb0610-2ad2-4979-a74e-6c70f3f5bafe-38e8/?fullscreen