Designing Roam, a banking app for spending abroad

Society is becoming cashless, but travellers still feel cash is the best way to pay when visiting other countries, because of high exchange rates and the worry that their bank will block their account while they spend abroad.

Roam was created to solve these problems for the yearly traveller and the everyday business person, giving them a good spending experience wherever they are. We called the concept roaming: just as your data adapts, so should your money.

I was the sole designer on a team building an entirely new product, from March to October 2020, so I got to gather information and design new features from scratch rather than improve existing ones.

We ran remote workshops in Miro, where we looked at every field in the journey and tried to reduce and streamline the process as much as possible.

We also split the journey into digestible chunks to keep people engaged, focused and on track to finish as quickly as possible.

Early on, I decided the onboarding flow needed thorough user testing so we could be confident it would work in production. Because the flow was short and needed no previous knowledge of the app, quick guerrilla testing was the best way to evaluate it.

I designed variations of the flow in Sketch, built clickable prototypes in InVision and, with a note-taker, tested them with people we stopped on the street, repeating until the flow was good enough for production.

I had a good idea of what the onboarding would look like, so I moved quickly from wireframes to interface design and prototyping. A preliminary round of five tests with colleagues around the office helped iron out inconsistencies and surface obvious mistakes first.

• seamless onboarding that integrates with government services
• multi-currency accounts that adapt to your favourite destinations
• advice on the best time to exchange currency, with the option to automate it
• a travel app you need throughout your journey, from before the flight to after you return home