🏆 Design Hackathon
Simplifying Digital Banking for Senior Citizens
The project focused on simplifying mobile banking for elderly users by prioritizing clarity, essential features, and minimal interactions.
Company
Encora
Domain
FinTech
Timeline
2 weeks (2021)
Role
UI/UX Designer
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Overview
As digital banking becomes the norm, many senior citizens struggle with complex interfaces, small text, and fear of making costly mistakes. This project focused on designing a mobile banking experience for elderly users by prioritizing simplicity, clarity, and confidence in essential banking tasks, informed by an understanding of their unique needs and anxieties.
Our Process
Working as a team of 2 designers over 2 intensive weeks, we followed a structured design process to tackle senior accessibility challenges.
Desk research & competitive analysis
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User interviews with 6 seniors (ages 65-78)
Created personas and journey maps
Defined main tasks and flow diagrams
Iterative prototyping with 2 major iterations
Discovery
Desk Research - Why are seniors struggling with Digital Banking?
METHODS
📊
Competitve Analysis of existing solutions
🎙️
6 semi structured interviews with seniors (age 65-78)
Complex Navigation & Lack of Clarity
Multiple menus and and unclear labels cause confusion and abandoned transactions. Small texts, low contrasts and banking jargon makes it hard to understand what actions they are taking.
Absence of Person & Forgetfulness
No human support/guidance when stuck leads to fear of making costly mistakes. Memory challenges make it difficult to remember multiple steps and navigate back to earlier screen.
Trust
The main barrier was just technology, it was trust, confidence and design that ignores their needs.
Design Approach
A systematic approach to crafting meaningful bot-human interactions, from intent mapping to final interface designs
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Based on our interviews, we created personas representing different user segments to guide our design decisions.
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We mapped the current experience vs. the ideal journey to identify critical pain points and opportunities for improvement.
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To organize features and understand relationships between the three main banking tasks, we created a mind map of the entire app structure.
Miro Board
Persona, Journey Map, Task Flows
The Design Challenge
How might we create a mobile banking experience that is accessible, confidence-building, and simple enough for senior citizens to use independently, focusing on the three core tasks of checking balance, sending money, and investing, without sacrificing security or essential functionality?
1. Simplicity First
Show only essential features. Remove unnecessary complexity and visual clutter.
2. Clear Feedback
Confirm every action with clear messages. Build trust through transparency.
3. Accessible by Default
Large text, high contrast, generous touch targets as standard, not optional.
Design Process
Iterations & Evolution
We went through 2 major design iterations, each addressing specific user needs and testing feedback.
First Iteration: Voice-to-Text Focus
Initially explored voice-to-text as the primary interaction method for hands-free banking operations.
Key Insights:
While voice input was appreciated, users still wanted clear visual feedback and the ability to manually edit entries.
Final Iteration: Hybrid Approach
Combined bold, clean step-by-step chat-like process with voice-to-text as a feature, giving users ease of use.
Final Solution:
Clear visual steps with conversational UI + voice input for accessibility.
The Solution
A Banking App Designed for Seniors
The final design prioritizes simplicity, clarity, and confidence-building features that make banking accessible to everyone.
App in Action
Watch a walkthrough of the app demonstrating key features and user flows.
The high-fidelity prototype was created post-competition as an exploratory exercise to experiment with new tools and AI-driven design capabilities.