Adrian Van Cooten - Lead Product Designer

Product Design, Rapid Prototyping, User Testing

Mox

Overview

Mox was among the first batch of banks to obtain the virtual banking licence from Hong Kong Monetary Authority in March 2019.

In late 2019, I moved to Hong Kong to joined as Senior Product Designer to the founding design team for Mox and I led the user experience and design for logging in, paying bills, requesting money and FX.

Moving to Hong Kong

Moving to Hong Kong was a bold move and there was a lot to learn. The cultural approach to banking was different to the UK. The locals in Hong Kong were not familiar with the concept of a bank that existed solely on your mobile phone. I also learnt that Hong Kong locals were extremely financially literate.

It was commonplace for the average Hong Kong person to have 2-3 credit cards and they were adept at acquiring the credit cards in a bid to get the best deals and discounts. It was also helpful that all of my colleagues were lifelong Hong Kong locals so I was able to learn first hand about the cultural insights regarding money, design and day-to-day life. Socialising with colleagues at lunch really helped me feel embedded.

User Research

In total there were 7 designers on the team and there was one User Research lead. All of the initial insight were gathered and collated by the User Research Lead. Often members of the design team helped and assisted User Research. As designers we worked together on taking on the insights and branistorming new ideas to solve the users problems

Paying Bills - The Problem

Paying bills in Hong Kong is a painful experience. Typically bank account users need to go to their local 7eleven or pay their bills directly in the local bank branch

Paying Bills - The Opportunity

Research conducted in Cantonese with Hong Kong locals identified there was a big opportunity. There are a finite amount of utility companies in Hong Kong if the payment details for each of the companies were to be collated, we could save bank account holders the hassle and time of having to pay their bills in person

Paying Bills - The Approach

I was tasked with solving the problem of helping users efficiently pay bills within the app.

The problems to solve was simple but collating the data to make the user flow was difficult. In Hong Kong everyone paid their bills at their local convenience store so we were introducing a brand new behaviour into the market.

The users needed a frictionless way of searching for the company that they wanted to pay.
The user needed to supply an unique reference number or account number
The user needed to have confidence that they were paying the right company.

Paying Bills - Results

There are a finite amount of utility companies in Hong Kong. By collating the payment details for each company we could save Mox users the hassle of paying their bills in person.

Three rounds of user testing were conducted in total. All tests were conducted in Cantonese with Hong Kong Locals. I produced prototypes for the tests. The test were conducted by the User Research Lead. The tests included the following

Discoverability of the Pay Bill feature
Pay bill flow usability

By the third round of test, 100% of users were finding the pay bill feature. As most Hong Kongers have dual nationality the feature wasn’t unfamiliar as they have experienced frictionless bill payments in other countries

Logging in

I was tasked with working with a Product Owner to create a seamless login experience for the bank. It was important to cover all of the error flows that a user could experience and it was imperative to ensure that the user could recover when an error was made.

Requesting money

A new feature that we wanted to introduce to the Hong Kong market was 'Requesting money'. There are many use cases for requesting money from a friend or even a random person. We based a lot of our insights around requesting money from someone after you had just eaten at a restaurant. The main reason was that there a big dining out culture in Hong Kong