Freedom Pay is the world leader in payment processing and data security. The company is in the beginning stages of developing an application that combines the underlying structure of Web3 with open banking technologies to create a universal loyalty program system. This system is heavily leveraged on the consumer providing varying levels of sensitive data in exchange for 'FP' or loyalty points.
1. To research and garner an understanding of the foundational aspects of comparable loyalty programs and other initiatives in the same space.
2. Test, ideate, and re-design their mobile application onboarding and home screens.
A Secondary Research Report documenting competitive analysis of current loyalty programs, literature review, and analysis on the mental model of user anonymity.
A UX Audit of the current Freedompay app and design recommendations from a UX perspective.
A mobile screen re-design influenced by user feedback and previous secondary research.
'FP' - Freedom Points, or loyalty points.
Credentials - Various data sources that can be enabled such as your phone bill or gambling monthly spend to receive FP and more opportunities.
Shoutback (or i-Zone) - A way users to directly reach out and advertise themselves to companies based on their enabled credentials.
Questions to Answer
In order to better understand loyalty systems as a whole, and identify key features that lead to their success. We mapped out its core features and how they work. This would then work as a backbone to analyze the veracity app and give us a point of reference when we would conduct our UX audit of the Freedom Pay screens.
This UX audit conducts a quality assurance test on the Freedom Pay application for accessibility, user interface (UI) component continuity, and design unity requirements. More specifically, this UX audit is to assess the usability and effectiveness of the app.
The team specifically noted the onboarding to be confusing and underwhelming. Upon opening the application, the user is presented with three (3) onboarding screens before gaining full access to the application. Each of which are incredibily boring, and don't communicate what their application is meant to accomplish. Why do I need a nickname? What is a Mnemonic phrase. Where is my password?
Original Home & Credential Screens
All items highlighted in red represent elements that provide no context to the user. When putting ourselves into the shoes of first time users we came to the conclusion that the application is simply unusable. The match between the system and real world is lacking, and even when certain elements are used such as the eye or book, the user still does not understand what these represent. Similarly, the visibility of system status may show that we have an FP balance of 100, but what does that mean and why do I care? The team set out to add an updated and refined onboarding to the application, as well as an updated series of main screens.
Following our UX audit we wanted to test upon the above screens to get a perspective from user. Here the main goal was to understand and gain insight from our users focused on ease of navigation, understanding of functions, and understanding of the core features and the permissions they need. The method used for testing was a read aloud walkthrough, we gave the user some context about the app and then gave the user the app to interact with. This enabled us to hear what the user thinking as they were working through the application.
Tasks given during the testing were as follows:
After conducting both secondary research and user testing the team made improvements in Figma to present back to Freedom Pay.
Because of the lack of original onboarding, there are not screens to compare ours to. The goal with onboarding was to make the user feel safe while also explaining key concepts of the app.
In the research phase we decided it necessary to add a 'Zero State' to the application, essentially showing first time user's a screen that helps them get acclimated to the Freedom Pay app. Becoming an active user would then initiate a switch to a standard home screen.
Because there was so much in your face with the previous credential screens, we set out to reduce the clunkiness, while improving readability and searchability. We have separated credentials into Active and Exploration. Active shows the current enabled credentials, while explore helps you find more that are unused.
The shoutbacks feature of the Freedom Pay app was largely lacking a clear information hierarchy. While already being separated into three sections of Shoutbacks, Invitations, and Coupons, these functions were never communicated to the user. Now that the Zero State has been added to our home screen, and with the additional help of our onboarding, the user doesn't have to figure out here what a shoutback is. Screens had an emphasis of being neither overwhelming or underwhelming.
Some of the future steps that could be covered for this project are:
