Western Union is the largest P2P money transfer in the world
I got hired as a Principal UX/UI Designer to redesign their app and responsive web
My role includes designing a non-native app, a responsive website, and a retail digital next-gen experience.
The Digital branch hired me to collaborate with the Product team and UX/UI India team to lead a refresh of the WU transactional experience. I used a greater stack of tools to manage this project and provide weekly status to the different stakeholders.
I used Sketch, Abstract, Invision, and Lucidchart to create and share quick lo-fi wireframes and prototypes, I also used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create complementary assets. The team used Zoom, Teams, and Jira to manage the communication and production work.
As part of the design process, I did basic research and benchmarking for best practices. The previous version of the app called R3 was almost a 10-year-old experience and a lot has changed since 2010. I got inspiration from other industries' native apps to validate best practices for interaction on login, profile, filters, widgets, action sheets, bottom navigation, dashboard, and more features. I got amazing support from the Product team to understand the current features and use cases; along with a detailed analysis of the competitors.
As part of my role, I validated the interactions from the user's perspective with potential customers by doing user testing sessions with the wireframes. The Product team also got a lot of previous feedback, research, and actual customer data from the actual experience to identify pain points and average user "persona".
The Project Management team set up a sprint plan to groom the features, iterate and review the technical viability of the new interactions.
WU partners provided insights from their previous experience
We benefited by doing flow maps to understand the journeys and use cases
For the MVP, we did 22 modules for app and web experience with more than 100 use cases in 8 months. A total of 6 senior UX/UI designers from Costa Rica (3) and India (3) worked on the final user interface and Design System components in parallel.
Being a very complex product, managed by cross-functional teams I got to review and approved most features with Content, Branding, Marketing, Legal, Risk, and Compliance teams to validate the new experience.
One of the great challenges as a design leader is to align external agencies and internal stakeholders
The UX/UI India team had a Design System for the non-transactional pages, it was an on-going project for the last 2-3 years, but when I got hired we identify that such DS was not aligned with the "native" app we were planning to launch as part of the refresh and we had to "refresh" the DS with new components.
A comparison between the old (left) and new (right) versions of the money transfer process
