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 users withdrawing money from an ATM from each of the major 5 Canadian banks.
A heuristic analysis was drafted of each video.
Brainstorming went from designing curved dividers, to hologram ads that acted to also block the person behind from seeing the user entering their PIN.
Finally, it was determined that “the best interface is no interface”. How can we eliminate touching this machine all together?
How might can we redesign the cash withdrawal experience so that the user does not need to touch the machine at all?
I noticed the Contactless sensor at one of Scotiabank’s ATMs. What if we could just tap our phones as we do with Apple Pay or Google Pay and then money would come out of the machine?
Wireframes were created to outline the initial flow of the contactless cash withdrawal.
Here’s the wireframes showing the user flow:
Prototypes were created and iterated to come up with the final design.
The Telus Design System was applied to the application to create a clean look and feel.
Another possible benefit of a contactless flow is that users shouldn't need to hide their PIN to possible onlookers. They might also not 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: