Exploratory Study on Digital Payments in India— April 2021

UPI payments look unstoppable in India with the lockdown driving record adoption, but how easy to use are the existing digital payments apps for the typical user? Our findings might surprise you.

Background

While living in Kerala, I observed that certain user groups were finding using digital payments very challenging & frustrating.

I was helping my neighbour set up his Google Pay, and he asked a few questions that I would never have thought to consider.

This exploratory research study is inspired by that incident.

That exchange motivated me to carry out an Exploratory Study on Digital Payments use in India with a team of UXers (3 researchers, 2 designers)) from the Interaction Design Foundation in Kochi led by me & supervised by IxDF Kochi founder Rejeesh R.

Challenge

The goals were

1. To explore the mobile digital payments space in India

2. Provide solutions for the problems users are facing

The aim was to carry out foundational research to learn more about the problem space & uncover user needs that aren’t being served by the current digital payments apps.

Process/Approach

Five-stage Design Thinking Process — Interaction Design Foundation

We used the five-stage Design Thinking model as taught by the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)

Explore

Contextual inquiry / interviews with 15 users

Some of the participants we interacted with

Participant selection: We decided to focus on vernacular-first business users using digital payments, located across Kerala & Bangalore.

We assumed that participants with low technical skills & not very familiar with smartphones would yield more foundational insights & usability / accessibility issues.

Methodology: I decided to use User Interviews & contextual inquiry as this allowed us to observe the users in their real-life setting, and gain an in-depth understanding of their life stories, goals, motivations, pain points and frustrations.

Challenges

All the team members had full-time jobs so the study could only be carried out on weekends
Getting good qualitative insights from user interviews depends highly on the interviewing skills of the researcher
Two other team members had to drop out early in the study

Define

The challenge was to organise the large volume of data we gathered from these interviews.

We decided to use Affinity diagramming to analyse & sort the qualitative data, & identify patterns in the user responses

Sorting & analysing the absolutely massive volme of qualitative data

We defined a persona from the affinity diagramming insights:

Busy Bilal: Business user of digital payments apps who has just migrated from a feature phone in the past 6 months

We did a Red route analysis to find the most commonly used features & chose to focus our design efforts on those. The most common use cases were sending money & receiving money

We decided to focus on payments using QR codes as that was the most common mode of receiving payments by business users

Design (Ideate, Prototype)

I carried out a Competitive analysis to identify how different user problems are solved in other popular products.

Click to view results of the competitive analysis

FINDINGS

We found the existing digital payments products do not match the mental models & technical ability of the user groups we studied.

1. Particpants are getting confused with all the jargon such as UPI, BHIM, QR codes etc

2. There is lack of awareness that the same QR codes are usable across digital payments platforms

3. There is over-dependency on using phone numbers for making payments to other users

4. The QR code & code scanner functions are not easily accessible in existing apps (Google Pay, Phonepe & Paytm all failed at making the basic functionality of sending & receiving money using QR codes accessible)

Google Pay, Phonepe & Paytm all failed at making the basic functionality of sending & receiving money using QR codes accessible

5. The icons, microcopy & CTAs in the apps are confusing or unintuitive

6. Participants find keeping track of multiple customer payments during busy hours very challenging

Part of the issue might be regulatory, part business goals & strategic initiatives, but a large part of the problem is with the UX design of the products themselves that is making the goal of financial inclusion more challenging than it needs to be for users.

The UX design of digital payments products themselves is making the goal of financial inclusion more challenging for users

My neighbourhood grocery store owner who was the trigger for this study

Next Steps

Based on our research findings & ideation sessions, we quickly sketched some lo-fidelity prototypes.

In Part Two, I will elaborate on

the redesign considerations for the top three digital payments apps (GooglePay, Phonepe & Paytm) &
prototyping a simple, intuitive payments app based on our research findings.

Thanks to all my team members from the study;

Who am I?

I’m a user experience researcher, tech enthusiast & strongly driven by the excitement of designing products & services that change lives.

My aim is to build products that help create opportunities for everyone, implementing insights from deep user research and best practices in accessibility & inclusive design.

Interested in collaborative & high-impact work where smart people are trying to solve unique, challenging & complex problems at the bleeding-edge of users, business & tech.

When not dissecting users, I enjoy hiking, reading, meditating & travelling.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn here.