Fusioning Fintech and VUI — a UX case study
Lean project: Toone.
There is something we need to be aware of: big things follow small changes. Small changes with the ability to make the difference and alter the course of events.
Do you see this product? Well… it is very faulty. And not only because it has a hard time understanding the user. Having to activate the device with “keywords”, limits the potential of the product itself. So let’s forget about “Okay Google”, about the orders we constantly give to Alexa, Siri or Cortana to activate their service.
The future is not talking (nor giving orders) to machines, but machines with the ability to talk to us.
Let’s imagine the house of the future: a house that is fully intelligent. You are reading a book in the living room, and the house says something like: “The light in the bedroom is on, do you want me to turn it off?” or warning you that “You left the fridge open”. It seems easy to imagine a house where, instead of a doorbell, you get notified that someone is at the door and asks you if you want to grant that person access.
We applied the Lean methodology to carry out the project. We had three weeks to ideate a solution, generate a real product and release it to see if users are interested in the concept.
Our brief stated that we had to generate a product involving fintech and voice user interface.
We started off doing a netnography to study the market, see what the competitors were doing and identify potential market gaps. We decided to create a proto-group to help us define our target which is between 35 and 45 years old with studies and a medium to high income. Next, we developed proto-journeys to determine what would be the ideal circumstance, in our target’s day, for our product to intervene.
With a KPI matrix, we set our general goals for this project and set up the strategies to follow in order to achieve it. We also carried out user stories, to organize the list of features that we wanted to work on.
We worked on the naming and branding of our product, and so we created Toone: a tool capable of providing you with your financial news in a fully automatic way through a voice assistant like Google Home or Alexa.
We intended to make the task of consulting financial information easier, and more accessible for users. Being able to use our voice to access a service seems like a more natural way of communicating. It allows you to do several things simultaneously: Toone walks you through your financial news while you are preparing breakfast.
Toone is easily configured using an easy to use app. It is as simple as setting up an alarm on your phone.
With Toone you don´t need to stop what you are doing to turn on the computer or browsing through your phone anymore. It saves you the need to remember to check your accounts. Toone is activated by users according to their needs, in a way that is as easy as setting up your morning alarms on the phone. You can easily activate and deactivate alarms and types of notifications. It is fully customizable and intuitive to use.
Accessibility was very important to us throughout the entire process of designing Toone. We truly believed that it had the potential to be a valuable tool for a great array of users. As screens and touch inputs have been eliminated from the main flow and substituted by VUI (voice user interface), we thought of it as a future indispensable tool for visually impaired people and people with reduced mobility. For users with greater limitations, the app would be equipped with a feature similar to Mac’s Voice Control to ease the task of configuring the alarms even more.
Additionally, we opened different social networks like Twitter and Instagram to help spread the word about the product and see if users would be interested with such a service.
We created a landing page to explain the product to users and collect information about their interests and their interaction with the service. For this task, we used Analytics and Hotjar.
The landing page and social accounts were open for 5 days. Our KPIs were set to a scope of 100 users and a bounce rate of 70%.
We didn’t reach our goals by little, but this is not a failure. The lean methodology has by pretext to “fail quick but fail cheap, to eventually succeed faster”.
I hope you enjoyed the project :)
