KINETIC SAVING POTS
UX
About HSBC Kinetic
HSBC Kinetic launched on the iOS app store in October 2020 with ~4k users, 4.7 iOS app store rating, and a 93% Satisfaction rating. Android version is currently in early access beta.
Based on real-life insights from over 3000 UK businesses, HSBC Kinetic is creating more than just a bank account. They’re developing a banking service that will help users transform how they do business. At a pivotal Beta testing stage, we asked a selected group of business owners for help to improve the service.
My Role
I had the opportunity to lead the design in this project from the very early stages.
We initially set up Kinetic labs, to pioneer customer-centred initiatives and enhance the way we ran user testing sessions. This way we could design a Savings Pots concept from scratch, and manage time frames that included interactive design processes. Kinetic labs then went on to support other customer initiatives such as the cashflow tool and Xero accounting integration.
Team members:
- UX research
- Service designer
- UI Designer
- Product manager
- Business analyst
- Technical business manager (overseas)
- Solution architect (overseas)
- IOS Developer (overseas)
- Legal advisor
- Lawyers
THE PROCESS
Quick meeting with business stakeholders (Product Manager and Business analyst) to gather requirements, user needs, understand what we want to do, highlight any limitations or must haves from the legal point of view. This is a completely new feature that followed the business savings account.
Between 85% – 90% of UK business’ have a business savings account, We want to reward our users/customers for trusting HSBC Kinetic with their money.
Accounts slices or partitions have become very popular since Monzo introduced their pots on their personal bank accounts a few years back. Revolut and Starling also have similar feature. Before we started, we had a look at what other companies were doing in this space.
Comments and observations:
- Personal or group vaults
- Customization; name, image, icon
- Set goal and deadline
- Roundup transactions (x2, x3….x10)
- Recurring contributions
- Goal breakdown (month/weeks/days)
- Category select
- Lock
- % of goal as visual
Together with the PO and BA for savings, we had a 30 minute session to define the objective for saving pots (how Kinetic saw pots in the future), realistically defining where we were and what can be done today. After a gap analysis, we were able to define small incremental improvements which would help us get where we wanted to go in the fastest and most efficient way.
We want to reduce the stress and the anxiety that most small businesses have when it comes to paying their taxes. Kinetic pots automatically will take and set aside a percentage of every incoming transaction. Users can amend and modify this percentage when they want as well as accessing their funds anytime.
Creating a new pot was a straight forward journey without a lot of complexity apart from some questions regarding how users added funds at the opening stage. Should we ask? Recurring contributions? So we decided to take those questions to the user testing session.
Managing a pot presented us with few challenges like:
- Shall we limit the amount of pots a user can have?
- If so, what should that limit be?
- How can we best explain to our user that a pot is a slice of their savings account?
After gathering insights and inspiration from the latest in the market, I did some early exploration on few concepts to tackle some areas of interest like:
- How do I show users everything they have “at a glance”?
- How can I allow users to seamlessly navigate from pot to pot?
- How can I allow users to create new pots?
Throughout the 2 days of testing, 9 one-on-one user research sessions were conducted. Senior stakeholders and other team/project members were encouraged to come, take notes and provide feedback on the sessions.
About the participants:
- All business directors
- “Responsible” for business finances
- Ltd business and Sole Traders
- Balance of genders, spread of ages and industry types
- Concept was well received, addresses an identified need
- Creating and managing a pot needs to be easy and straightforward
- Some usability improvements to the flow and explanation identified
- There was a concern among some participants with a seasonal or fluctuating cash flow, that this would preclude them from sing pots, as they over identified with the need for regular payments to fill the pots
- The relationship between accounts and pots were not always clear in user minds
- Confusion identified: Which account the pot is in
- Confusion identified: What happens if a payment needs to be made and there is no money in the account, but there is in a pot
- Confusion identified: Interest rates on money within a pot
- Confusion identified: “I want to be able to see what I’ve got… I want to be able to see it at a glance…”
Once the user testing feedback was implemented, there were a couple of scenarios I could do with a bit of help from the rest of the design team, so I blocked everybody’s calendar on a Friday afternoon and ran a design workshop to get everyone’s input.
- Show breakdown; savings acc, pot 1, pot 2 underneath total savings in the home screen.
- Long press and hold on top of savings to display where and how much it is.
- Swipe right and left to see what’s allocated into each account/pot
Learnings & Takeaways
- Concept was well received
- The feature addresses an identified need that people have to set aside money, and can feasibly alleviate the mental weight of this
- Has to be easy and straightforward enough to justify the trouble of engaging with, understanding, setting up, and managing a pot.
- Continue to iterate the flow of creating a pot to ensure that the possibility of adding a goal, a date, and different methods of filling up a pot are evident to a user before they begin to complete them.
- Usability related improvements to the flow and explanation identified
- The introductory screens set expectations that provide a strong foundation for understanding and usage of a feature.
- They are often not read by users, or scanned, where concept misunderstandings can be created and can linger, limiting the use and value that someone can get from a feature
- The relationship between accounts and pots were not always clear in users’ minds.
- Initial user questions should be addressed within the interface:
- Which account the pot is in?
- What happens if a payment needs to be made and there is no money in an account, but there is in a pot?
- Interest rates on money within a pot?
- The ability to create a reminder when creating a goal was appreciated
- The reminders for the performance of pots was also desirable, both under performing and over performing