Case study · Mobile App
Are you aware of your finances, better yet, taking charge of your financial health?
Not to worry, you aren't alone! M23 will help make solving your finances easy and manageable, with a financial partner you trust.
To kick off the project, I researched millennials — our target audience — and their financial habits and outlook, to get a sense of what they'd want and expect from a banking partner.
Nearly half of millennials are counting on tech startups to overhaul the way banks work — they believe innovation will come from outside the industry. I explored apps making an impact in the fintech space to get a sense of their onboarding, core features, and overall look and feel.
Nearly half of millennials say they're counting on tech startups, not banks, to overhaul how banking works. That research narrowed down to one persona — the "Unintentional, Digital Star": digitally savvy but not a digital pro, and generally unsettled about their own finances.
From there, I mapped the journey of a new customer opening an account for the first time across three phases: onboarding, account registration, and in-app experience.
I usually sketch a rough flow before wireframing. Here's an early onboarding concept focused on the ID-verification step — capturing a government ID, then a selfie, with liveness checks run in the background to confirm the user is real.
As with any real product, direction shifted with stakeholder feedback and technical limits. A few things didn't make it into this version:
The first pass let users skip at multiple points during onboarding. Since creating an M23 account or linking an external one was never required, users could land on any of 4 different home screens depending on what they skipped — with very limited functionality on most of them.
The result was 4 different sets of home screens that the user would have arrived at, since we didn't make it mandatory to create an M23 Bank Account or link an external one. Below are examples of each route a user could have taken — the ability to skip at multiple points during onboarding.
1st onboarding iteration
To help users clarify the different phases of onboarding, we added this "navigation page" that lives right after you create an account. It gives the user a brief intro into what each step is.
2nd onboarding iteration
I introduced a demo feature on the onboarding screen so users could explore the app's features and capabilities without signing up first — hoping that seeing the app in action would build trust ahead of account creation.
3rd onboarding iteration
Alongside the InVision prototype, I put together a quick style guide to keep the visual language consistent across the project.
The final onboarding flow led with the demo, kept the navigation page but narrowed it from 3 options down to 2 (create an M23 account, or link an external one), and reduced the skip paths down to just 2 possible home screens.
Once onboarding is complete and an external account is linked, users land on the overview page. From here, a user like our persona "Sara" can send and receive money peer-to-peer through Buddy transfer, see her 5 most recent transactions across linked accounts, and check spending insights to get a better read on her habits.
A few things I'd carry into the next project: