Santander Mobile Banking

Surprisingly, even though interviewees were generally satisfied with the functionality of the apps, they usually find it hard to manage their day-to-day finance in the apps. Nearly half of the interviewees are using a digital-only bank’s apps, Monzo, as their main currents account as their apps are reported to be better at tracking and managing personal finance.

Although Santander has another app, Santander Mobile Wallet, for tracking and analysing expenditure, only two out of thirteen interviewees have tried using the apps and discontinued using because they prefer other mobile apps.

What do users really want?

Based on the feedback from interviewees, here are the major pain points of the Santander Mobile Banking app:

•　Cannot see pending transactions
•　Cannot find/modify standing orders
•　Cannot find the direct debits section
•　It’s difficult to pay others in the apps (most prefer using Paypal or Monzo for this)

As most users reported that they are satisfied with how they are managing their personal finance currently, my original idea of merging both of the mobile banking and mobile wallet apps was dropped. I realised that it is more useful for them if these major pain points are fixed in the short term.

New Designs

The new designs are targeted to solve the mentioned pain points. As I’m not redesigning the whole app, I kept to the existing user interface. Therefore, the focus is on the UX.

Standing Order

The original design allows users to access standing orders by clicking on an ambiguous tab after they click into each account. As mentioned, most users cannot find where the somewhat hidden function. Moreover, you cannot view all of your standing orders from different accounts in one place.

The new design proposed adding three tabs in the Pay section where users can switch between Pay, Direct Debit, and Standing Order, as they all involve paying to an external account. According to interviewees, they mostly use the apps to view transactions and pay others. Therefore, moving this function to the Pay section would make it more noticeable.

Direct Debits

Likewise, users can access Direct Debits in the Pay section of the new design. During the research stage, I found out that the Santander Mobile Wallet app allows users to view previous transactions made to the same account. I think it would be useful if the Total Transactions history is added to the Direct Debits page as well.

P.S. Two regular Monzo users commented on the same function, with regards to expenditure made to a specific shop, that it is interesting and sometimes shocking to see their specific transaction history.

Paying Others

The original design does not allow users to search for the name of the saved payees, neither is it arranged alphabetically. While it is in the order of the most recent pay history, it is inconvenient for some users to manually search for their payees each time.

A quick fix to this would be to allow users to rank payees alphabetically, or add a search function that allows them to search for the saved users/reference. Interestingly, one interviewee mentioned that she always got the Payee Name and Reference mixed up. There was even one instance where she transferred the money to the wrong person because of it. By adopting the new design, the distinction between these two fields is clearer as well.