Our client started life as Chippin, a shared payment service offered to merchants at the checkout stage of their retail Ecommerce platform.
They came to us to help transform the product from a B2B site integration to a consumer-focused mobile app solution.
To provide an alternative to BNPL by protecting users from debt risks associated with credit facilities.
To capitalise on the pre-purchase space and eliminate the need to chase others for money.
To empower users to unite easily for group purchases to make the previously unaffordable affordable.
In a consumer retail market where BNPL companies are increasingly partnering with retailers whose target demographics skew toward Millennials and Gen-Z, we chose to bring Eric to the fore in order to give our solution the best opportunity to do the most Social Good.
Eric needs a simple, straightforward and effortless payment sharing solution he can trust.
He wants to share the cost of unaffordable items with friends, and find a way to split the cost of events and nights out so there's no chasing money afterwards.
The team now had a clear idea of where each function or "Opportunity" could benefit Eric, our ideal user in the timeline of the use of the product.
We brought Eric along to the Design Studio we held on Zoom and Miro with our clients, Chippin.
With the progress made so far, we met with our clients to discuss an updated path for the project in relation to the Persona we had developed.
Our role here was to prioritise what we felt we could achieve within the sprint - So our solution remained a mobile app rather than an integration to another service.
We returned to the Persona to support this as input from our users so far and concentrate our efforts around the scenario of ‘chipping in’ for tickets for a gig.
Maybe we could sprinkle some of these other objectives in at the end...!
We took part in a quick ideation session with the clients:
Directions: Fold your paper into 8 parts, and sketch a thought for 60 seconds. They can be in words or pictures, sequenced or stand-alone. All ideas are good!
We began by outlining the sequence, and finished with voting on the best elements overall that we wanted to take forward:
At the same time, the User Flow presented a diagram of how the user interacts with the product - for us this was not necessarily every step but another way in looking at the major turning points in the journey.
Through our iterations we tested with enough users to begin to notice firm trends - 6 users for the first paper prototype and 10 users for the next iteration in medium-fidelity.
This last Testing screen, the Payment page, proved a real point of contention for the team. The main challenge we found was how to define whether we were still in the flow of using the app, or whether we were outside, and the app could rely on authentication for payments from another app.
For the sake of the demonstration here, we've used the example of a Stripe checkout page to simulate a pay screen. Ultimately this would require some fine-tuning!
To help users learn the way the app functions and the language terms it uses we developed an onboarding flow that could be used on first start-up.
Our client was quite responsive to ideas we put forward around the notion of achieving the surprise and delight around having a chip.in fill up and be ready to use.
To put together our Onboarding flow we returned to the Design Studio to collaborate and vote for our favoured solution:
To view the final hi-fidelity Onboarding flow involving animations put together by Lilly, see the run-through below.
The brand "Chippin" had been a constant source of hesitation for users throughout the project because of its association with "chip-and-pin" payments.
I wanted to give it an update to simplify it and make it more relevant to the context of its use:
We collaborated with sources of inspiration for Fintech mockups and narrowed our focus with consideration to Eric's demographic and the fashion of competitors' apps that are widely used.
Slight gradients were a recurring theme in online banking apps, for example:
The style guide was developed by the three of us and published by Lilly.
Throughout this process, my main challenge was tuning my sense for the right time to incorporate ideation and defining the scope of the work. I could throw a few too many what-ifs into the mix!
I learned a great deal about being clear around setting goals for tasks, and was encouraged by seeing the effects of a positive outlook.
"The ability to capture a moment, a feeling and harness that into a design concept is a truly exceptional skill, which, standing alone would be a great reason to work with Tom. However, Tom's ability to present ideas, distill complexity and find ways to educate an audience surpassed all expectations.
We thought we had a passion and excitement for what we are working towards as an emerging Fintech business, but Tom's energy, knowledge and clear articulation of design ideas encouraged us all to think bigger, bolder and challenge our perceptions."
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