project

64 senior product executives from Visa Asia Pacific and 10 designers from the consultancy Chemistry came together at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore to participate in a human centered design workshop. The aim of the workshop was to drive behavior change and encourage a more user centric way of thinking within the Visa team.

Participants were divided into teams and given a user persona profile for whom they had to design and prototype a product or service which addresses their specific needs and pain points.

my role

• Creating 36 personas - ranging in age, income level and tech savvy - from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.

• Conducting research about the financial culture and spending habits in each country so the team would be prepared to guide their groups in developing a suitable prototype for their given user.

• Developing a deck of 32 disruptors that are changing the fin-tech scene so the Visa team could design competing prototypes.

• Writing user journeys for the personas, which include pain points.

• Co-facilitating the workshop and assisting the teams in mapping their target user’s interests, needs and wants, determining pain points; writing ‘how might we’ statements, and putting together a storyboard.

• Photographing the event and editing the corporate video.

learnings

• Engaging busy executives entrenched in finance, who may miss the insights brought up by user centred design.

• Ways in which user centric design can be applied in the financial world. For example, what about people who don’t trust credit cards?

• Developing communication and co-creation skills in a hierarchical environment (where an intern needs to communicate in a certain way with those with titles and experience)

• Initiating ideation when teams were stuck in bringing their users to life - by asking questions like “What kind of phone do they have – if they have one at all? What brands would they buy? Where would they go on holiday, and how often?”

outcomes

Visa executives walked away with an understanding about the importance and urgency of user centred design in finance, defined value propositions, ideas for strategic partnerships, and 8 different storyboards and prototypes for users from various walks of life. The prototypes involved expanding their products to design for an array of problems such as a user from an older generation not trusting e-commerce, or someone from a cash based society hesitating to switch to cards.

Their ideas also accounted for challenges such as “what if your solution has to work with zero interchange?” in order to prompt the teams to design beyond their usual business model and explore opportunities to disrupt the market.