DISCOVERY PROJECT FOR KOIN PAYMENTS
Agency: Apply Digital
Role: UX Research, UX Design + UI Design Support
Year: 2024
Background
Koin was a two-year old digital payment platform that allowed customers to use the Koin digital wallet to fund their casino games. They were looking for ways to expand their product offering and market reach beyond gaming, and into other customer verticals.
Challenge
Koin’s challenge was twofold. First, they needed to drive adoption of cashless payments in gaming environments where cash remains dominant. Second, in order to expand their market reach, they needed to first understand which other customer groups were viable, and how Koin could offer value to them.
Solution
Through extensive business and customer research, we determined which customer groups Koin should focus on, identified what value Koin would bring them, and designed mobile app features that would help these customers achieve their goals.
Defining The Next Gen
Over three months, the team worked with Koin to define a future beyond being a payment product, using customer and industry input to define a path to becoming essential to users' lives.
With the research discovered, data and personalization will enable customers to live their aspirational lifestyle — allowing Koin Payments to become crucial to people’s entertainment needs and providing operators, retailers, and hospitality venues with access to direct communication.
Understanding User Needs:
To discover and understand Koin’s most viable markets, we conducted extensive customer research, including:
- Digging into industry reports and trends
- Speaking to casino operators and their customers
- Facilitating multiple online workshops with potential customers to understand their user journey and needs
Identifying Moments that Matter
Based on the research and customer workshop, we created user journey maps that helped us identified 6 key moments where we could either solve a pain point, or elevate an existing experience.
One Experience Map Per Persona
Honing in on 'Moments That Matter'
Within each experience map, we’ve identified multiple “moments that matter.” The Key Moments emerged as stated user needs in our research, while the Opportunities are hypothesized to be
Content blurred to keep client data private.
Ideating & Co-Creating Value
Using these key moments, we conducted an ideation workshop to brainstorm opportunities to make Koin valuable to customers in these moments.
Designing, Prototyping, and Testing
Based on the identified opportunities, we created user flows and designed app screens. We turned them into prototypes in order to test the viability of the concepts and designs, observing whether or not these concepts resonated with customers.
Objectives
- Validate the concept for each proposed CX moment: Do end users feel these features are useful and would they use them in their regular life?
- Evaluate the usability and experience of the app and identify areas for improvement: Are there any pain points users face when interacting with the designs?
- Ensure that wayfinding and the organization of the app is intuitive to the users: Can users find their way around without difficulty?
Methodology
- One-hour long 1:1 online usability test sessions with our target user personas
- 5 sports bettors; 5 entertainment seekers
- 50/50 gender split, ages 22-60
- Testers click through a Figma prototype, attempting to complete a given task.
Moving Towards the Build
Through usability testing and synthesis, we validated 4 out of the 6 concepts, and gathered valuable insights for future refinement.
The successful prototype provided a strong foundation for initiating the app’s first development phase.
A New Paradigm for Experience
The center of Koin NextGen is a modular, widget based interface, delivering unique content and offers tailored to the user to drive engagement and retention.
