Fictitious new bank by Telus that is introducing a new way to get cash safely and quickly without touching the ATM.
The COVID-19 virus heightened fears of contracting and spreading a deadly disease to others. We have become aware that touching surfaces and being too close to others can cause viruses to spread.
Bank ATMs were not originally designed with this in mind and require the user to touch the screen and pin pad in order to do a simple transaction like withdrawing money.
When I reviewed the videos of the cash withdrawal from the ATMs of all the 5 major Canadian banks, I noticed that they all used the same touchscreen technology.
The touchscreens produced glare and finger marks could seen on some of them. All ATMs are in proximity to a window so people had to contend with glare on the screen on a sunny day.
Every transaction with entering your bank card into the slot followed by a prompt to enter your PIN number to log in to use the machine. The user are encouraged to cover their PIN to protect it from anyone, which meant their had to get closer to the screen and pin pad.
The user would then have to touch the touchscreen (or the buttons on the side of the screen) in order to complete a transaction. In total, a user had to touch the machine at least 6 times to get cash.
This experience is not safe, slow, and could be improved.
Videos were taken of real people withdrawing money from an ATM from each of the major 5 Canadian banks.
A heuristic analysis was drafted of each video and personas were created to help find a north star to guide the project.
Josie is a 65 year old recently retired factory worker who held many speed records at her former company. She has 2 grandchildren and loves spending time with them. She is in the high risk if she were to contract COVID-19 and so she needs stay away from any possible sources of the virus. She has low vision and English is a second language.
She has an iPhone and uses it everyday to listen to music, communicate on Facebook / WhatsApp. She continues to go to branch to do all her banking, however. When she withdraws money she has set a "Fast Cash" setting to withdraw $200, in all $20 denominations, and to print her receipt. It was set by her banker and she never changed it since.
She loves the convenience of "fast cash" and it makes her more loyal to her bank. She believes she can do anything others her age can do. She has learned how to tap her credit card for purchases from looking at her peers. She requires a bit of help with setting things up on her phone. Once set up by her children, she beleives that she can start using Apple Pay.
In the initial brainstorming the ideas diverged greatly and ranged from using more machine learning to analyze the habits of the user and personalize the options accordingly; to frosted curved dividers that would block malicious people from any angle so that the user didn't need to get close to the ATM to shield their PIN; to floor to ceiling hologram wall that not only blocked the person behind from seeing the user entering their PIN but could be scaled to show important updates or even provide triaging service if AI technology advanced to this point.
Finally, the ideas were converged to focus on the theory that “the best interface is no interface”. How can we eliminate touching this machine all together?
Problem to solve: How might we redesign the cash withdrawal experience so that the user does not need to touch the machine at all?
As I continued down this focus, I noticed the Contactless sensor at one of Scotiabank’s ATMs. What if a user could just tap their phones as they do with Apple Pay or Google Pay and then the money would just come out of the ATM machine?
I set out to design what this experience could look like.
Wireframes were created to outline the initial flow of the contactless cash withdrawal.
Here’s the wireframes showing the user flow:
Paper prototypes were created and tested with people ranging from an 11 year old to a 63 year old. Through the testing it was discovered that there needed to be a clear indication to the user that the transaction was processing on both the ATM screen and the mobile phone as both screens were looked at by certain participants (with the older participants favouring the ATM screen).
Telus has two major companies: Telus and Telus Health.
Telus is a major telecommunications company. They offer mobile phone services and have retail stores all across Canada.
Telus Health offers health benefit plans across Canada.
By adding ATM machines in their stores, this could allow Telus to maximize the retail space in their stores, attract more potential customers to their stores, and reinforce the company's focus on innovation (ie use smartphones to tap) and wellbeing (ie "safest way to withdraw cash").
Telus could also use their bricks and mortar infrastructure to team up with a new online-only challenger bank to provide them a physical presence and generate more revenue in the process while marketing themselves as a new bank as well.
For the final design, I applied the newly launched Telus Design System. It was designed to create a friendly look and feel and provides a clean consistent visual language across all Telus brands. Its purpose is to communicate the holistic brand promise of Telus and when applied to an ATM screen it immediately becomes apart of the Telus family.
Another possible benefit of a contactless flow is that users shouldn't need to hide their PIN to possible onlookers. They might not even need to remember a separate 4-digit PIN for the ATM if the banking app has already identified them (ie using biometric identification or an online banking password).
This process also allows the user to be in front of the ATM for less time as they did most of the selections ahead of time on their device. There should be less line ups at ATMs as a result and less exposure time to any germs in the room where the ATM is located.
We were in the middle of a pandemic and it really highlighted how hard it would be to do guerrila research (ie: just going up to a random person and ask them to participate in your research study). We are also dealing with people's money and secure bank account information.
This prototype was created in May 2020. It seemed that at the time no banks in Canada (and possibly in North America) had released a fully contactless cash withdrawal feature.
From my research, these two US banks were promoting their new “cardless” feature as contactless: