Personal banking - The Boubyan app
The Boubyan app is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface and the extensive range of services it offers, making it a leader in digital banking in Kuwait. Users appreciate the app's simplicity and the intuitive way it handles complex banking needs. With features like instant account viewing, card management and seamless transfers both locally and internationally, the app simplifies everyday financial tasks. It also includes innovative services such as cardless ATM withdrawals and digital card issuance, enhancing user convenience.
The app is praised for its robust support system, notably through its chatbot, Msa3ed, which offers round-the-clock assistance, reflecting Boubyan’s commitment to customer service excellence. However, some users have expressed a desire for minor improvements, such as better navigation and information display within the app. Despite these small areas for enhancement, the overall user feedback is overwhelmingly positive, emphasizing the app's effectiveness in providing a comprehensive digital banking experience.
The app is now 5 years old and with consistent growth and so many releases has grown with features and services, some which work and some that are desired to be removed. This year, we secured a budget of $3m to engage one of the best digital design agencies in the world to work with my team to trim down and clean up and improve the UX on user needs and goals but also focuses on adding magical moments of delight to the experience to make a mark on the global stage.
In the first year of its release, the app:
Increased the user base by 30% and active users by 24% in six months
Increased core product sales via the app over 300% in eight months
Increased financial usage by 70% and 175%
Since then it has seen a yearly increase in usage with:
average of 25% growth of newly registered users
increase to 85% of registered users from the total customer base
increase of active users by 35%
increase of logins and average monthly logins by 50%
average increase in transactions and average monthly transaction of 62.5%
And from a product sales perspective:
an increase of savings accounts by 50%
an increase of fixed deposits by 60%
a 30% increase in financing after release of digital borrowing
RoI from investing in UX
MLP - Address usability issues
For the Most Lovable Product and first release, the priority was to address our customer’s issues with the older app to give them a better experience form the get go. Here’s a comparison of some before and after screens to give you an idea of how I addressed these issues
The classic theme
An insight into the Boubyan app design themed for all Boubyan customers except the youth covered in the next section. The design features use of sound, haptics, animations and microinteractions where possible for an enhanced user experience. However, the main focus was always on usability to drive efficiency and productivity for our customers. Unfortunately as we grew, and added feature, service and journey year on year, the app has come to a point where we have embarked on the next chapter of design which aims to clean up the app and information architecture but more importantly will carry Boubyan through for the next ten years with an innovative next gen interface that takes expectations to the next level with magical moments of delight. An exciting project that I hope to see through to the end.
The PRIME theme
PRIME was designed with a youthful theme and tone of voice to appeal to Kuwaiti students before they get into the workplace. Boubyan has 60% of the youth market in Kuwait and the main painpoint is we lose out on holding on to these customers as they enter the job market because of strong family ties to other legacy banks in Kuwait. This theme was created to cater to their needs and goals and our new retail app project kicked off in 2024 aims to bridge that gap even further to ensure customers for life.
Dark mode
Dark mode became a viral trend just before Covid and probably gained strength during the long months people were locked in their homes staring at screens. For someone like me however, with a background in the aviation industry, dark mode was a necessity for employees who spent long hours monitoring screens in dark environments. While the backgrounds were predominantly black and dark shades of grey, it was imperative that all information displayed was low contrast green in colour to reduce eye strain. HUDs on military aircraft and submarine display monitors had a similar colour palette. However, the trends substituted the low contrast green for low to medium contrast shades of grey which is what we adopted for the app.
The chatbot - Msa3ed
Msa3ed is a chatbot that is available through the app for a conversational banking experience. The design for the chatbot only came to me three years ago to begin addressing UX issues that had crept in over the years. Over the past two years we have redesigned most of the interface and continue to align components and journeys for an optimal experience. The issue though is the bot is a switch over from the app run by another project team. While the two have been competing for years, I have strongly stuck to the realisation that the bot is just a conversational interface while the app is a touch base interface for the same banking functions, features and services. Our new app project mentioned earlier aims to break down the walls between the two to create a visual interface where customers can interact through touch, type and voice for a seamless interface with a virtual banking and financial assistant ready to jump in when needed.
Design system
While I advocated for a design system in my first few months at Boubyan, it was repeatedly turned down as it was seen as an unnecessary expense in time and money as we had to keep developers well fed for sprints with a healthy backlog. When that backlog was large enough, we started working on a design system in our own time but we weren’t able to get it off the ground. In 2021, we moved from Invision and Zeplin to Figma and tried to secure an agency to help us build the design system, which management was now ready to invest in based on our ground work the year before and the RoI demonstrated. Unfortunately, we learnt that the agencies were just as new to design systems as we were. We had done our own learning while trying to secure and agency and we decided we could implement it ourselves in one year with a dedicated resource. With the hard work of a very talented and hardworking designer, we achieved this goal and begun using the design system.