HDFC Bank Redesign

6 min readJan 29, 2021

Overview

HDFC Bank is the largest private sector bank. The HDFC Net Banking mobile app has a large customer base with more than 10 Millions download. Every user wishes to use its website or app for any task related to banking rather than visiting the bank.

Project Prompt

I am a regular user of HDFC Bank also some of my friends and my family members, they we always complaining about the UI is pathetic and the many other issues. I was not sure about what were the “issues” they were facing, so I have decided to do some research on this part and find out what actual problem users were facing while using the application.

Design Process

Empathize

Who are the audiences?

Understanding the user is the main task, that is needed to develop something that works for the users. So, start by finding for whom HDFC Bank works for. So we can distinguish the users on the basis of ease of technology and financial securities.

User Research

This is the first step in the research process and the aim is to Understand the problems and validate it by interacting to actual users. The main insight that we will get by this process will help us define the problems for which we can work to produce a solution and validate the same.

I started by online research and tried to gather out some of the pain points that users were facing while using the application on the other hand I have also noted down some of the major problems that I faced during the interactions

So, for that I decided to conduct Qualitative and Quantitative Research through online mode mode via Google meet, Zoom Calls etc.

Quantitative Research

Firstly, I decided to look over the general banking trends and how mobile banking application fits into lives of people. So for this, I decided to conduct a survey which included users of HDFC Bank and other bank also in order to get a higher number of responses.

The survey included participants of various age groups decided on the empathize phase, and the survey was distributed personally to everyone.

There were Total of 21 responses that I got from the survey, that was not a huge sample size but through this survey I got the basic insight.

Questions

What is your frequently used finance app?
What is your most frequent used banking medium?
How often do you login to your bank’s mobile app?
How often do you visit your bank office in month duration?
Mention most of the used feature in your bank’s mobile app?
Mention the most frustrating pain point of your bank’s mobile app?
If given an option to invest through your bank’s mobile app will you use the that?
Do you avail loan features through your bank’s mobile app?

Insights

Most of the commercial apps are used over the personal banking application due to more functionalities, clean UI .

Most of the people use the internet banking features, so adoption of app can be enhanced by providing more features.

Users don’t like to visit bank for any small task, they try to avoid visiting the bank.

Checking account Information (Account Balance), Fund Transfer and Transaction history is the mostly preferred. Applying for loan, Investment and Insurance related activities are the least used as they prefer to visit the bank for these kind of activities, because of Securities and trust issues.

Paying the credit card bills, Applying for beneficiary, applying for cheque book is the most frustrating part.

Users don’t prefer to use the banking application for investment purpose, they rather prefer to use specific app for the same.

If the process is easy and convenient to use users will prefer to open the account through the application

Qualitative Research

Now, to related the insights that we got from surveys, Interviews were conducted over Google Meet with 5 people. Firstly the users were made comfortable during the interview to maintain the free flowing conversation . Now by these interviews we will get real insights of mobile banking behaviour of people.

Interview Questions:-

What does you your typical day look like?
When did you open you HDFC bank account?
How often do you login to HDFC banking app and what was was your experience ?
What are the key task that your perform in the the banking application?
What problem do you face while using the banking application? (pain points)
Do you feel safe while doing banking transaction on the mobile app?
Have you ever faced any technical issues during any of the important task?
If any problem arises, what are your initial steps ?
Do you find any difficulty while locating any of the features of the app?
What do you like about the app?
Are there any improvements / features that should be implemented in the app?

Many more question according to views and thinking and the answers that I was getting from the users

General Insights

Safety is the most important factor in attracting users to use the mobile application. Fingerprint authentication is very important while logging into application and during any financial transactions.

2. Whenever there is any technical issue during any task , Firstly user try to solve the problem user chat feature, if its not solved they prefer to interact with bank official .Because human interaction is preferred in case of any sensitive issues.

3. Users felt that the app had too many features which they rarely/never use. When asked to explore the app, some users were surprised to find certain features present in the app.

4. None of the users said that they used the “My favorite” option on the homepage, repetition of features in several categories creates a confusion.

5. Information architecture of the app is very confusing, related to finance, payment, transaction or like something. So we should make it more simple, easy to navigate and make the content well categorized. But on the current app, the navigation and other content architecture are a bit low and unorganized somewhere.

Guerrilla Research

Problem Statement

The overall experience of using HDFC Bank app is very confusing due to overload of features and functionalities. There is need to improve the whole experience of the application and make it organized.

With some of the above mentioned research process, I found that banking application lacks in UI Design.

The main problems that I figured out during the Research phase were:-