Currency Converter
A multi-brand approach to Westpac’s Currency Converter.
Design team
Me (experience designer), Cristian Frulla (visual designer), Brendan Smith (research), Maren Giesler (research)
Tools
Miro, Figma, Axure
Timeline
Oct 2021 - Mar 2022
The context
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) mandated that all banks and foreign exchange providers need to be transparent to customers on all applicable fees when calculating sending money overseas. This was part of their Best Practice Guidelines with a hard compliance deadline of 29th March 2022.
We redesigned the currency converter for Westpac, St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA.
Looking at the current state
We had an existing currency convertor which was outdated and hadn’t been touched in years. There was no analytical tagging in place on the tool that could give us any behavioural insights to build on.
It had limited interaction and was non accessible. The exchange rate was also only updated once a day and was prone to errors due to the existing API.
Previous Westpac Currency Converter
What mental model worked best for customers?
The current currency convertor had a conversion first and then apply fees mental model, which the business stakeholders thought worked best for customers.
We thought differently, and our key assumption was that greater transparency would be provided through including the fees in the upfront calculation.
The journey to customer testing
We ran a design jam and conducted a voting session with stakeholders and the wider design team to land on a design to take to testing. Then we started prototyping the two different mental models.
This was my first time prototyping in Axure but it was a really fun experience and definitely a big learning curve. Cristian worked on the hi-fidelty designs I created the workable calculator prototype in a week and off to customer testing we went.
You can check also out the prototype for yourself here in Axure. Password: FX2021
Key insights from customer testing:
We wanted to know more about how customer’s send money overseas. For personal, business and FX traders, all participants viewed exchange rates on XE.com and used that a basis of comparison across other banks and providers.
Majority of participants preferred mental model A with the resultants as it freed them from having to do any additional “mental math” to work out the final amount. This was a surprise for a lot of senior stakeholders who thought customer’s preferred a conversion first followed by the transaction breakdown. They were all receptive to this feedback and for them highlighted the importance of customer testing.
The “rope” design was also preferred by participants to display the transaction breakdown as it provided a sequential yet modern design.
Final designs and key screens
Design principles we were guided by
Natural language: Avoid banking jargon where possible, assume the user is a novice and provide explanations for any complex terminology, grounded in real life examples.
Playful and visual: Repayment calculators and other predictive tools should enable playful interactions, visually encouraging the user to manipulate the numbers with gestures. Beyond the written word.
Context over consistency: There is a cost to providing information that is not relevant to the user. We need to understand a user's context and consider this when selecting what content to display and the next steps available.
Design advocacy
Design advocacy was a key aspect of this project. We worked with a lot of senior stakeholders from Financial Markets and Global Transaction Services that are far removed from the digital world and aren’t familiar with the design process.
We started off this project being briefed by senior stakeholders with powerpoint mock ups of what they envisioned the currency convertor to look like and an expectation to deliver high fidelity designs in 1 sprint.
Through our advocacy, we bought 4 sprints worth of time to do discovery research, stakeholder interviews, design jams and commissioned 1 round of customer testing - which in a regulatory project with a tight deadline is hard to achieve in a big bank.
The outcome
Our currency convertor was delivered on time in Mar 2022 and we’ve had really positive customer feedback, shown by an uplift in page traffic and an increase in customer’s subscribing to our rate’s sheet.
Customer testing also provided the business stakeholders with insights to help review their pricing models and fees for international payments with the business reducing transfer fees for international payments.
See our new currency convertor for each of our brands: Westpac, St.George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA.