<aside> 🔙 Country roads, take me home
</aside>
Digital payment apps have seen a stellar growth in India in the past 5 years.
India saw a staggering increase in UPI payments since the pandemic began.
While all the leading UPI payment apps are making great strides towards creating an all-inclusive payment solution within their systems, there are huge clusters of users/potential users who are finding it more and more difficult to cope with digital payments.
This project was conducted to identify these users, understand their pain points, empathize with their reluctance to use these apps and ultimately design a solution that is both inclusive and feasible.
Role : UX Design, User Research, Wireframing
Team : 3 Researchers, 2 Designers
Duration: As all of us in the team had day jobs, we worked on the project over the weekends over a span of 5 weeks
In order to find the foundational issues with users and uncover any usability issues with the current apps, we decided to interview users who were mainly small to mid scale vendors, who are not well versed in English and may also have low technical skills and knowledge of smoothly operating a UPI payments app.
I decided to acquire information from users using contextual inquiry and in-depth interviews. Walking around the city of Thrissur, Kerala, I found the following participants fitting for this project:
Name: Jayaprakash C Age: 56 Retired State Govt. Employee
"I find it hard to trust people. Today, everyone is out there to cheat you or heckle you. There are so many cases where people are being duped, and now its easier than ever to fall prey to such scams."
Name: Suraj Age: 39 Partner in a restaurant business
"Business has been hit hard by the pandemic. We are currently running with only 7 staff, as opposed to 40 that were employed here in the heyday."
Name: Faizal Age: 29 Manager at a book shop
"Almost all of my friends use either PhonePe or Google Pay. I rarely carry any cash on me nowadays. I can easily make payment through my phone as most shops nowadays have that scanning card."