The briefing: design an app that would show a traveler the lowest currency conversion rates available within a determined area by pulling data from conversion sites and comparing it with what’s locally available.

Roles

Even though this is a hypothetical product, I decided to think about it from a business standpoint - how could this be more than just another pretty currency conversion app that would be uninstalled after just a few uses?

Creating personas was the key to coming up with ideas on how to increase retention.
By questioning what potential users might want and need I was able to create features I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

The proto-personas (along with benchmarking) gave me an idea of the features the app could have. I then sketched user flows and very lo-fi wireframes so I could have a visual idea of how they could actually work.

At the same time I was iterating on the wireframes I started to think of an art direction for the app. I gathered examples of similar apps and products but also from inspiring projects that I believed could help me get to an aesthetics I liked and made sense for the project. Based on that, the concepts of Clean, Personal and Trendy came up as a way of describing the look and feel I wanted for the UI. I kept these 3 concepts nearby when designing the UI for increased focus.

As a way of quickly testing ideas, I did some basic prototypes using Craft and Invision on Sketch and asked people to test them as I iterated.

Some ideas were ditched - such as the trip planner which would help users know how much money they would need based on their ideal lifestyle for a trip, its duration and general cost of living on the destination (data pulled from dedicated websites) - that seemed way out of place and too complex.

Other ideas were born - a bot that gives users the info they ask for in an easy-going language, free of jargon most do not understand. It would be like engaging in a conversation with someone neutral who wouldn’t try to fool you or hide information from you in order to profit.

I tested this idea, it seemed to work and it answered the briefing successfully. It was time to wrap up and transform those unattractive wireframes into a cool user interface. Every design element - the bot illustration, the colors, the fonts and so on - were decided based on the concepts defined earlier: Clean, Personal, Trendy.

The bot displays all currency exchange agencies within a given location radius sorted by best to worst deal. 

This simple feature aims to keep the app from being obsolete after users use it to exchange currency. It may be the difference between being forgotten/ uninstalled or being present during the users' trip, increasing retention.

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