Playbook: Designing Financial Products for the Women of Bharat
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Playbook: Designing Financial Products for the Women of Bharat
Proposing ideas and interventions across the user journey by leveraging the insights collected from interviews in the Banking on Women series.
Access to and usage of financial products and services is critical for women's economic empowerment and overall development. Designing financial products that cater to their specific needs plays a significant role in achieving this goal. Therefore, having a playbook that outlines best practices, case studies, and guidelines for designing financial products for women helps in bridging the gender gap and improving the adoption of digital financial products and services among women.
This playbook articulates certain principles that help in designing financial apps more inclusively for women and to help improve their Digital Financial Capabilities
. The target readers of this blog are product managers, founders, researchers, designers and all other stakeholders involved in designing and developing financial service apps. The guidelines shared are intended to help build gender-intentional fintech solutions that improve access and usage among women users.We understand that the complexities involved in designing gender-intentional products can go beyond the screen. That’s why making it an iterative and gradual process is important. We outline the whys and hows of designing inclusive financial products from the point of view of women, using insights from primary user interviews conducted as a part of our Banking on Women series.
The Playbook
Our playbook provides solutions tailored to each stage of the user journey, taking into account the user's goals, motivations, various interactions and touchpoints. It covers the full spectrum of the user journey, from product discovery to troubleshooting and support providing interventions at each stage designed to create a seamless and enjoyable experience for the user. Download the PDF to learn more.
The need for a gender-intentional and inclusive approach
Apps that are designed to be inclusive of both genders are likely to scale better in the market. Most service providers in the country lack an in-depth understanding of women's financial needs and preferences. Assuming men as their primary users, they end up creating complex, non-intuitive interfaces that fail to meet the needs and capacities of the different segments, including women. This leads to most first-time users, regardless of gender, struggling to even complete the onboarding process
.Design principles for creating gender-intentional interfaces
While designing for either gender, it is essential to be mindful of certain values that apply to all users and adhere to them.
Design principles help bring consistency throughout the design process by ensuring that the focus remains on the user’s needs and preferences. It provides a road map for decision-making and a basis for evaluating the success of a project. We apply each of these principles to the various stages the user encounters in their journey with the app.
User Journey Framework
A user journey framework is a tool used in user experience (UX) design to map out the steps a user takes when interacting with a product or service.
It usually begins with the user’s initial discovery of the product and ends with any troubleshooting or support that may be needed
. The framework is used to better understand the user’s needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of the journey in order to improve the overall user experience. It typically begins with the user’s initial discovery of the product and ends with any troubleshooting or support that may be needed. Using this approach enables us to analyse and understand the user’s needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their journey. This helps provide granular solutions that leverage relevant design principles to improve overall user experience.Defining our Target Audience
While we do intend for this product to be inclusive, we need to define a base target audience and then include more segments as we go. Many fintech platforms assume men to be early adopters of technology and tend to design their interfaces with a gender-neutral approach.
In this playbook, we are considering a target audience of women who have basic literacy levels and awareness that often translate to the usage of financial services like banking, payments, credit instruments like loans or credit cards and insurance.
In conclusion, designing fintech products that are ‘inclusive’ for women requires understanding their unique needs and experiences at each stage of their user journey. By considering their goals, motivations, and interactions across fintech platforms like investment, insurance, and credit, we can design interventions that promote trust, and accessibility to help improve their digital financial capabilities. From discovery and consideration to troubleshooting and support, every stage presents an opportunity to create a positive user experience that meets the needs of women and promotes financial inclusion. By using this playbook as a guide, we can create more equitable and accessible financial solutions that benefit everyone.
This article has been written by Rajashree Gopalakrishnan, researcher at D91 Labs.
All artworks are designed by Himanshi Parmar, Rahi Deroy and Rajashree Gopalakrishnan.
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Digital financial capability is the ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, evaluate, and use financial services offered through digital technologies. https://content.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Better-Practice-Guidance-on-Women%E2%80%99s-Digital-Financial-Capability-2.pdf
User journey framework inspired by the report on Solving Mistrust in Financial Services by CIIE, TTC labs, Parallel and DICE