NatWest Request Money

The NatWest mobile app gives users a faster way to get paid. By creating and sharing a link or a QR code, users can get paid without needing to share their account details.

Because of existing mental models, users were unaware of this feature. The objective of this project was to improve the experience to improve the usage of these features.

Three smartphones displaying a mobile payment app on a dark, sandy surface. The screens show options for sharing payment links, splitting bills, and how the app works, with a consistent purple and white interface.

Existing UX review

The existing journey to create a custom link or QR code was located in the payments area of the app named ‘request money’ - a high traffic area of the app but suffered from high fallout rates.

Screenshots of a mobile app showing the process of sharing a link for payment, creating a QR code, and generating a shareable link, with fields for reference, amount, and buttons for generating QR code and creating link.

Elsewhere in the app, I discovered other features utilising similar functionality: 1) Reusable link and QR code, and 2) split the bill. These were useful features that had significantly fewer page visits.

It was clear there was an issue in discoverability of these other features.

Three smartphone screens showing mobile banking app interfaces, including account balance, QR code for payments, and bill splitting features.

Guerrilla testing

To understand the pain points in the journey I wanted to go beyond the data. To do this in a quickly I decided to use guerrilla testing. As hypothesised, participants weren’t able to locate some of the features that weren’t located in the ‘request money’ section.

A large flowchart of colored sticky notes organised for research data insights

Design exploration

I suggested that the main focus should be bringing all these features together into ‘request money’. To take this a step further, we used a segmented control to switch between a customisable link and the reusable link. This idea came from competitors such as Monzo. We did 2 rounds of usability testing to ensure users would be able to understand the different use cases between 2 similar features.

Screenshots of a mobile app with research notes

Final designs

Due to the size of the project I suggested a multi-phase release with the business. In the first phase we added split the bill into ‘request money’ and refreshed the UI. Key changes involved splitting the tasks over multiple screens to make the user feel like they were progressing, and signalling that the link had been shared successfully.

Screenshots of a mobile app showing steps for splitting a bill,

In the second phase, we added the reusable link and QR code into ‘request money’ alongside the existing features. Depending on the use case, the user could now tab between creating a customised link or QR code, or sharing an reusable link or code.

Screenshots of a mobile payment app showing options to request money, share a link, and show a QR code for payment.

Did it work?

Post-release data showed a significant and sustained increase in the usage of the split the bill feature. At the time of writing there is no data available on phase 2.