A financial wellness app for Seniors involves multiple user types with different needs and constraints: From Tech-Savvy business owners who are comfortable with digital tools to Single Seniors looking into Estate Planning. By discovering their pain points, their vulnerabilities and their support structure through personas, design a UX solution transforms a frustrating, manual process into a streamlined digital experience that benefits everyone.
This Case Study focuses on Payments.
🧠 This Case Study uses is AI: For corrective grammatical tasks, to verify facts and provide Journey Mapping insights.
My End-to-End Design Process: From Discovery to Design and Solution.
- Problem Framing: Defining the business problem and the user needs.
- Research & Strategy: How to balance quantitative data with qualitative insights.
- Design Decisions: Trade-offs, justification and Insight.
- Final UI: Sneak preview of the work I do everyday.
My Approach
01 – Problem Statement (Defining the business problem and the user needs): Create a user-friendly and simplified mobile journey that helps seniors mitigate their fraud anxiety, meet financial industry standards and ultimately manage their finances to make informed financial decisions (i.e. their financial wellness).
02 – Segmentation: Identify distinct segments within the “aging parent” demographic (e.g., healthy retirees, chronic conditions, single parents). Target a segment that can most benefit from a Financial Wellness App, particularly the Payment process.
03 – Research & Strategy: Which research methods you chose and why (e.g., how you balanced quantitative data with qualitative insights).
- Customer Journey Mapping: Visualise the financial and emotional challenges faced by each segment across their lifespan.
- User actions in a timeline > user thoughts and emotions /narrative) > Condensed to a visualisation.
04 – Wire framing Design Decisions: Making trade-offs and delivering a justified UX solution.
- Make a Payment: Retail & Business Payments is the most complex fintech journey, especially in the UK, and especially on mobile.
01 Problem Statement
Create a user-friendly and simplified mobile journey that helps seniors mitigate their fraud anxiety, meet financial industry standards and ultimately manage their finances to make informed financial decisions (i.e. their financial wellness).
01.1 Designing a low-anxiety mobile payment flow for seniors
Map out a diverse range of seniors’ on a specific financial journey. Identify recurring frustrations, anxieties, and unmet needs to form themes. Using an appropriate Design System executes a learned solution to contribute to solving senior financial wellness through a highly complex task.
My experience consistently highlights that fear of fraud, cognitive load and digital literacy are major barriers to mobile app adoption and successful task completion for seniors. These fears are amplified during critical tasks like payments with multiple cognitive and security demands.
Teams struggle to create a mobile payment flow that simultaneously meets modern security standards (e.g. multi-factor authentication, biometric prompts, Confirmation of Payee) and minimises the cognitive load and motor skill precision required by seniors with age-related limitations, leading to high rates of transaction abandonment, locked accounts, and increased financial anxiety.
01.2 The business problem and design challenge
Balancing the need for a simplified flow, with the need for a robust, secure multi-step flow – required to mitigate fraud anxiety and meet industry standards – is the biggest challenge.
- • Simplify complex tasks
- • Prioritises key information
- • Offers context-sensitive, proactive (not crisis-driven) support tools
- • Respect their independence while safeguarding them from fraud
Pain points: Unintuitive interfaces, difficulty with small text/controls, fear of scams/fraud, loss of control, and lack of consistent support for money management capacity, unclear fraud alerts, and difficulties with two-factor or biometric authentication.
👉 Complex flows increase the cognitive load.
Segmentation
PERSONAS
🧠 These Personas use AI: To qualify primary and personal experience, to generate profile photography and clarify vocabulary.
Tech-Savvy
02.01
Research & Strategy: How to balance quantitative data with qualitative insights.
Retired professor of English Literature.
“I’m not afraid of technology, but I want it to be simple and intuitive. I shouldn’t have to read a manual to figure out how to use something basic.”
Tech-Wary
02.02
Retired accountant.
“I’m old-fashioned. I don’t need all these fancy gadgets. I get by just fine with what I have.”
High-Net-Worth
02.03
Focus: User-friendly interface, advanced features like budgeting tools, investment tracking, and retirement planning calculators.
Caregiver-Dependent
02.04
Focus: Features that enable family members or caregivers to assist with financial management, such as shared access, bill pay assistance, and alerts for suspicious activity.
Single-Senior
02.05
Characteristics: May face unique financial challenges such as navigating retirement income on a single income, planning for long-term care, and estate planning
Caregiver-Dependent
02.06
Characteristics: Still providing financial support to adult children while managing their own retirement needs.
Key consideration themes from personas:
- • Accessibility: Visual impairments, cognitive decline, and physical limitations. i.e larger fonts, high-contrast colours, and voice-activated controls.
- • Simplicity: Easy to navigate and minimal clutter.
- • Personalisation: Adapt to individual needs and preferences.
- • Security: Prioritise security and privacy, protecting seniors’ sensitive financial information.
- • Develop tools that address multi-generational financial planning: Financial modelling tools.
- • Promote financial wellness and stress management: Offer tools and resources to help the Sandwich Generation manage stress and prioritise their own financial well-being.
Research & Strategy
Journey Mapping User Profile
03.01
Explore the specific scenario for a Tech-Wary senior, with a lack of support, and simple banking needs:
Journey Mapping Scenario: She receives a paper bill in the mail. She has a basic current account with a local bank branch, but prefers to handle her finances in person. However, the nearest branch is now closed, and she has limited access to reliable internet and a basic smartphone.
- • Lack of digital literacy: Mrs. Davies may be unfamiliar with online banking, mobile banking apps, or digital payment methods.
- • Limited technological access: She lacks reliable internet access and owns a basic smartphone, restricting her ability to utilise digital banking channels.
- • Reduced physical branch access: The closure of her local branch removes her preferred method of banking and increases her reliance on alternative channels.
- • Lack of support: Mrs. Davies may not have family or friends who can assist her with online banking or other digital tasks
Journey Map
03.02
Make a payment
Cognitive decline, reduced steps and fraud anxiety.
Wire Framing Design Decisions
Making trade-offs and delivering a justified UX solution.
04.01
Make a Payment
UX designers are re-writing their playbook and shifting their approach to creating the UK Payment digital experiences. Using native mobile patterns that provide a white glove experience, dynamically reacting to task orientated user needs.
1. The Accessibility-First Mindset:
Inclusive Design from the Start: Not just meeting legal standards like WCAG. It is a shared team responsibility to implement descriptive alt text for images and proper strong visual cues (colour, icons, etc, etc) for assistive technologies.
2. ‘Hand-Holding’ experience
Mobile patterns are evolving to provide a “hand-holding” experience, guiding users through their tasks with minimal friction and anticipation, Personalisation and Progressive Disclosure all reduce the cognitive load.
3. Task-Oriented Patterns
The goal is to help users complete their objectives as efficiently and effortlessly as possible.
The ‘Make a Payment’ Journey simplified
04.02
From 13-Steps;
- Start – Presenting the primary task to establish task focus.
- Select payment type – Define the transaction context to enable contextual filtering.
- To > From – Source and destination mapping
- Existing or New Beneficiary – Slightly prioritise recall (existing payee) over data entry (new payee) to reduce user effort.
- Confirmations of Payee – Critical security check. Provides reassurance.
- Payment details – Complete and clear. Ensure the payment’s purpose is accurately communicated.
- [Optional] Select currency – Presented only when relevant
- [Optional] International payment – Trigger specialised fields and disclosures, only when the system detects an international need.
- [Optional] Fees – Ensure transparency by proactively disclosing all costs at the point of decision, building user trust.
- Scheduled – For future payments as a secondary payment path.
- Fraud Warnings – UX mechanism to initiate a reason for payment for the user.
- Review – Single-screen summary allowing the user to execute the F-pattern check.
- Authorisation – A strong authentication layer (e.g., biometric, PIN) to prevent fraud.
To 4-steps;
- The What – Initiation and Context
- The Who – Beneficiary and Destination
- How Much – Transaction Details and Customisation
- The Final Check – Execution Preparation
Wire Framing Design Decisions
04.03
Realising the final UI
04.04
SNEAK PREVIEW
From defining a real-world business problem, in one of the most complex ‘Make a payment’ journeys, I was able to use UX tools to uncover pain points and leverage touch points to inform an initiative UX wireframe flow that in turn informed the final UI.
Transfer to
To identify the destination of the funds.
Payments Details
To specify the transaction parameters: primarily the amount to and from, the date, source account, and other dynamic information.
Transfer to
Primarily visual inspection of a summary screen. User interaction is minimal, usually a Confirm or Back button.
Outcomes
04.04
- Key stakeholders audience established 2-months before proposed Sprint through workshopping and client relationships.
- Pain points highlighted early, including CoP, Secondary payment reference and scope (i.e Feed and FX was descoped)
- Cross platform UX and UI for Alpha release delivered and demo’d in 3-months
- Developer and BA handover scheduled early for estimation and to provide clarity.
- Design System integrated for customer review and UX Copy Check sign-off
- No deadline missed in 3 months
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