Paper Prototype (What didn’t work + what I did differently):

I tested the final paper prototype on 4 undergraduate students.

My observations:

• Meditation (square breathing):
  • Majority of the hard control preferring users found it boring
  • Soft control preferring users admitted to liking it.
• Putting some money in savings every time you make a leisurely payment:
  • Soft control preferring users found it invasive and mildly offensive, so much that they thought nobody would ever like the feature
  • Hard control preferring users liked it better than meditation

Direct Feedback:

Feedback: People were confused about why a notification needs to be clicked on before a payment happens, they are used to payments happening as soon as they are initiated.

Reflection: Here, my personal bias played in because in India, it’s common to have a confirmation before you pay but that’s not the case in the US. So if people saw a notification before they paid in my paper prototype, they didn’t know why they saw it or what to do. They did not click on it but they expected to have their payment go through successfully, and then they were confused as to why the payment didn’t happen not knowing that they had to click on a notification.

Here, we could use existing UX techniques to ‘teach’ the users that you’re gonna get a notification every time you make a leisurely payment, and that you’re going to have to look out for it in order to use this money saving mechanism.

Feedback: (Meditation) “Don’t tell me to think right when I’m about to make payment, tell me to think a little beforehand”

Reflection: This calls for going back to my ideating phase and changing my entire design. However, I expect the second option to cause a situation where the user anticipates spending extra money before each leisurely purchase, and that makes the user think twice before making a payment way before the user has initiated the payment. How to incorporate a habit forming mechanism for the meditation option I still have to figure out.

Feedback: What I did not anticipate was people swiping the notification to dismiss it completely.

Reflection: That’s a perfectly normal thing to do to a notification! The final solution is Not an easily dismissible notification, but an unmissable alert.

Feedback: The text is a lot to read when you are trying to understand how this function will work

Reflection: Reduced the text

Feedback: While explaining the 2 options, there is also a ‘surprise me’ button that is meant for users who do not know which method will work best for them and would like to try them out at random while making a payment. However, some users ended up clicking on that button before they even tried the 2 options out. That’s not what we want, we want the user to try both options out and then if they are confused, they should consider using the ‘surprise me’ option.

Reflection: Maybe only show the 2 options upfront, and after the user has tried both of them out, they see a ‘surprise me’ option.’

Final UI Prototype: