We set out to design a seamless, intuitive mobile money smartphone platform for bKash's 28 million users, with the ultimate goal of accessibility—building confidence in
low literacy users through thoughtful subtleties and interactions.
Bangladesh, home to 165 million people, represents a unique opportunity for a mobile money platform: universal wireless network coverage, widespread personal ownership of mobile phones, a cash economy, poor physical infrastructure, and a favorable regulatory environment. bKash is the country's fastest growing mobile money provider with nearly 85% market share and national coverage, dramatically expanding access to formal financial services for the people of Bangladesh, over half of whom are unbanked.
While bKash's current services are accessible via SMS/text messaging, smartphone penetration is increasing rapidly. We worked with bKash to design their debut smartphone app, with the challenge of designing a platform that is both intuitive for their majority low literacy and low digital-literacy users, and also "cool" and modern to attract young tech-savvy urbanites.
Starting with deep empathy building and user research, we quickly conceptualized, prototyped, and tested designs with a focus on low-literacy users. The final design included color-coded service flows, voice assistance, QR enabled merchant payments, and a tap & hold feature to confirm transaction.
We integrated with a 3rd party development firm to transition the designs and detailed documentation to product definition and development planning, co-locating for the first several agile sprints.
The app launched in May 2018 in the Google Play Store with over 1.5 million downloads in the first week alone.