Wallets are not secure containers for financial and personal items. “The Wallet Project” is a solution for people who always lose their wallets unattended.
By incorporating a locking mechanism and linking it into the user’s smart phones, the wallet is now a secure vessel for your belongings.
The Wallet Project is an ongoing mini-project started at General Assembly. We spent 10 minutes each session to practice the covered topic during that day.
The project was developed up to low-fidelity prototypes and was tested immediately. No further iterations were done thereafter.
Student —Collaborative Project
1 Week – 30 minutes each session
Pen, Paper and Figma
User Interview, Storyboarding, User Flow, Paper Prototyping
To discover how people, carry, uses, and interact with their wallet
What kind of wallet do you have?
What do you use your wallet for?
When do you bring your wallet? Do you keep it with you at all times?
What do you put in your wallet?
Where do you keep your wallet?
How do you carry your wallet?
What do you hate most about your wallet?
What are some problems or unpleasant situations have you encountered with your wallet?
Anything to add?
Both users carry, uses, and interact with their wallets differently. More variables are needed to find out which preferences are more common. Preferences on wallet’s styles and logistics also varies, but was emphasized as an important aspect of the product, nevertheless.
One common denominator, however, is their anxiety of misplacing their wallets. Aside from logistics, leaving the wallet unattended was the prominent pain point of the two interviews.
How might we make the wallet secured?
How might we always keep track the wallet?
How might we notify the users when the wallet is not with them?
How might we prevent users to leave their wallet in public?
Our instructors gave us 15 minutes to look back at the How Might We? and Problem Statements we just wrote about redesigning the wallet experience and create 8 Worst ideas that could solve the problem, look at the bad ideas for inspiration, and then create 8 Best ideas to solve the problem.
After generating 8 Best ideas to solve the problem, I picked one idea I liked the most, “the GPS wallet”, and expanded into a series of steps of how it might be used.
The entire ideation process was presented to the class and was critiqued. The 8 worst ideas were fun to discuss, and actually stimulated my creative flow to creating the 8 best to the User flow diagram.
With the Storyboard and User flow in mind, our instructor gave us 10 minutes to make low-fidelity paper prototypes.
We later uploaded the paper prototypes to POP by Marvel, and did a quick user testing.
I later colored and re-uploaded the paper prototypes to Figma for portfolio purposes.
Using Pop, we partnered up to do a quick 10 minutes usability testing.
The user completed task of finding the wallet, but asked what are the device icons are for. According to her, this was an unnecessary feature since finding wallet is the only task she needs to do, and fluidity of the screens could be also improved upon with a little more time. She is also curious how the hardware, the wallet itself will be made.
With redesigning the wallet in mind, I noticed she was using a Louis Vuitton wallet. Furthermore, most women in the room have name-brand wallets. I then looked back on the User interview feedbacks, and realized that style and branding is very important to the users—more so that they’d rather use a name-brand wallet than a more secured one.
So I pivoted. Maybe the wallet doesn’t need to be redesigned—maybe users just need a smart lock for their name-brand wallets.
Ironically, a wallet lock was one of the “bad” ideas I created with in our exercise, “8 Worst idea party”
Next Challenge: redesign the padlock into a smart-lock, and incorporate it into a wallet.
Moving forward, I’d like to go back for a more extensive research on the hardware side of the product. I am excited to validate the hypothesis for this pivot and sketching lock designs.
Basketball Jones
Basketball Jones aims to create social connections through the sport of basketball
