CASE STUDY - 2024
The Wave by Scotia Bank
-Transform mood-driven spending into smart savings and healthier habits.
Introduction
The Wave by Scotia Bank offers flexible budgeting and spending control. Budgets, spending classification, and real-time transaction editing are all possible for users. The Wave offers extensive spending insights along with mood tracking and personalized notifications. It's available by pressing Advice+ icon and switching to the wave. The feature also provides convenient access to previous statements along with customized learning materials tailored to the users spending habits.
Design Process
Discover
Analyze
Problem statement
Consumers often make purchases based on their emotional state rather than practical needs, which can lead to unstable finances. By understanding the emotional context behind these spending decisions, banks can offer a feature within their existing banking app that helps users better manage their finances. This feature would track mood-based spending, providing insights that enable users to make more informed financial decisions and maintain stability.
Objectives
Unify components such as the logo and style to achieve design consistency.
Establish a clear visual hierarchy with consistent font sizes and an aesthetic homepage.
Seamlessly integrate the reservation process into the official website to streamline user interactions and improve accessibility.
In the initial phase of the Discover process, we concentrated on learning how emotions influence spending. Many users make impulsive purchases driven by their mood, especially on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Shop, leading to potential financial instability. We designed The Wave to solve the shortcomings in the current tools as a result of our research.
By combining mood monitoring and budgeting, this function helps users create better financial habits and provides insights into their emotional spending behaviors. It includes a dashboard for monitoring trends, educational resources, and personalized alerts and advice, enhancing the Scotia Bank app to better support financial management.
Team
Led by a team of UX researchers and designers. My responsibilities included creating low-fidelity designs, mood boards and logo ideation and brainstorming, defining integration flows, user testing, work on new feature alerts and switching icons between Advice+ and The Wave. Lastly collaborated with the team to finalize designs for a seamless mobile experience.
Role
Designer, Researcher
Constraints
Limited time and Resource Availability.
During a brainstorming session, I came up with different ideas to capture the essence of our project. The idea for the logo, "The Wave," grew from this process. I wanted to show how both mood and spending rise and fall, like waves. This wave pattern became the main theme, representing the ups and downs in our emotions and financial habits. The logo brings these ideas together, reflecting the project's focus on understanding and managing these changes.
Analyzed user needs and spending behaviors, identified challenges, and defined the scope for The Wave.
Finalized on:
Integrating features to set and segregate budgets by essential or leisure categories
Implementing functionality for editing recent activities and adjusting categorizations based on spending type
Adding customizable pop-up notifications to track and categorize purchases instantly or at specified intervals, including mood tracking
Designing a user-friendly dashboard to view spending patterns, past statements, and educational resources tailored to spending behaviors
Enhancing visual hierarchy and consistency within the app
Creating a user persona to represent goals, expectations, and pain points related to mood-driven spending
User Flow
Mood Board and Color Scheme
UI Style Guide
Paper Brainstorming session
Low-fi wireframes
Final Design
In this stage, our team conducted a dynamic brainstorming session, generating innovative ideas such as, user flow mapping, paper prototypes, wire framing, a UI style guide, and created iterations for the logo
Create
Logo Ideation and Brainstorming
High Fidelity Iterations through three stages of Usability Testing
Learning Outcome
This experience has taught me important lessons in UX research and design, highlighting the importance of user-centered thinking and creative problem-solving. Moving forward, I am excited to apply these skills to future projects, enhancing my ability to design impactful features that improve user experience and drive engagement in digital platforms.