Remitly mobile app

The Remitly app allows immigrants all over the world send money to their family and friends back home.

MY ROLE

  • Know our customers’ goals, needs and pain points to provide informed designs that continuously improve upon our product experience

  • Lead the design of new product features in collaboration with stakeholders, product managers, other designers and engineers

App IA and UI redesign

Before

The Remitly app’s information architecture wasn’t optimized for adding and promoting new features.

After

Transfer card and details redesign

Along with the UI changes, I proposed a redesign of the transfer card and details to provide a more consistent way to communicate with our customers. This would also lay the foundation for adding and expanding upon features like the ability to edit and share details with their recipient.

Process: identifying user needs

Card sorts and user interviews

To inform the IA and transfer redesign, I evaluated 10 hours of Remitly customer card sorts and interviews to determine users’ top actions and other important use cases to improve in the app experience.

When using the app, customers want to be able to easily:

  1. Check exchange rates

  2. View transfer status

  3. Send money

    Also important customers want to get notified about transfer delays and be able to easily correct issues.

Usability studies

Crucial findings came out of several prototype usability studies on a variety of potential designs.

  1. Bottom navigation was preferred and easier to use

  2. Icons without labels weren’t easily understood

  3. Users had different mental models around starting a transfer.

    • Some users preferred to add their recipient information before beginning a transfer.

    • For existing recipients customers expected to be able to start a new transfer:

      • from the Send Money button

      • from a previous transfer

      • from selecting their recipient from the Recipients screen.

Quantitative data: tree test hierarchy

I worked with our research team to launch a hierarchy study that measured success rates of 155 users comparing our existing IA and the proposed IA.

The new app IA showed large improvements for task completion

Implementation and QA

Once the project was scheduled, I outlined the design changes, tested builds, and worked closely with the engineering team until we had a launchable new app experience.

Foundation for the future

The new design allowed us to continually improve upon the product by enabling the addition of other discoverable new features, such as:

  • In-app Help Center to allow customers to easily get help where they need it

  • Language selection during onboarding for bi-lingual customers to easily set the app to their native language for easier comprehension

  • Multi-factor authentication by push notification or SMS text message for account security