The challenge

Kian Digital lets people open bank accounts in the application. It is a place for all money decisions too. It would help users define financial targets and start to save money to reach them. it also gave people investment choices by offering investment funds. There are also a set of popular financial tools like QR payment, paying service bills, buying data plans and prepaid cellular credits. It also offers a personal financial manager (PFM) which helps people categorize the money they’ve spent and help them to control their income and costs. So it was a considerably big application with vast solutions.

To come up with the ultimate navigation solution I started to gather data. As we were a startup with no products alive, my source of data was mainly competitive analysis. We also had a lot of market research data, individual interviews and and focus group results done by our marketing team at the time I joined Kian.

I analyzed different applications in the filed like popular mobile banks in the Europe like N26, Atom Bank, Moven, Monzo, Plenti, Robinhood and my favorite one, Acorns. We hadn’t any domestic competitors back then. I’ve also had a lot of experience about mobile app navigation solutions when I was working at Dunro. So I came up with an idea of information architecture Which I firstly converted into a mind map -Mind maps are my favorite technic to visually interpret what’s in my mind.

I crafted the architecture by presenting it to the product team, we spent hours to refine and polish it and finally it became a good starting point for sketching ideas.

The Solution

I tried a lot of different visual implementations. The idea was clear, we need to use Tab Bar (Bottom Navigation Bar in Android world) and a side menu. It was a tested solution for a variety of different applications even with different purposes like the Twitter app. With minor differences I sketched different types of home page:

I also prepared some prototypes to test the navigation solution. I normally prototype by Flinto or Principle.

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The solution was very successful in the early tests so I started to work on the final design based on our tests results. this is the final design: