- The GoTyme Bank app won another international design award– a 2023 Good Design Award for design excellence from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies (the Museum).
- The app’s product design team, based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is headed by Silvano D’Orazio, who has said that “good design is simplifying people’s lives and giving them dignity when embarking on an unfamiliar journey.”
- The project description notes that in mapping out and designing each user journey, the design team leveraged design trends (both in the global and local markets), usability heuristics, and user research, with the app’s information architecture constantly being refined through card-sorting—resulting in an overall banking experience that is perfectly in sync with people’s needs and expectations.
- Founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, Good Design is the oldest and the world’s most recognized program for design excellence worldwide, which honors the yearly achievements of the best industrial and graphic designers and world manufacturers for their pursuit of extraordinary design excellence.
GoTyme Bank, a joint venture between the Gokongwei group of companies with the multi-country digital banking group Tyme, won another international design award. The GoTyme Bank app received a 2023 Good Design Award for design excellence from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies (the Museum).
Founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, Good Design is the oldest and the world’s most recognized program for design excellence worldwide. For more than 70 years, the award has toasted everything and anything produced in and for the environment, from a paperclip to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner or NASA Space Ship.
Out of the gate, one can tell that the GoTyme Bank app was made for the 21st-century Filipino. The simplicity of the GoTyme blue-black-and-white color theme gives off both a youthful and premium vibe. The app shows all the transactions at the bottom of the main page, allowing users to keep track of their financial activity — from deposits and cash-ins to points earned and money spent on shopping.
YouTuber The Fireplace PH says he appreciates this “clean dashboard, with all the other features navigable via the home button,” making it clutter-free and “not overloaded with information.” Online magazine The Beat Manila has pointed to this feature as a nod to the fact that “most Filipinos have trouble paying attention to multiple things at once.”
Other user-bloggers also appreciate that, by default, the platform conceals the debit card number and cash and savings amount. Also, as another layer of security, the app automatically logs out after three minutes of inactivity—a good safety feature to block unauthorized access.
In sync with people’s needs
The GoTyme Bank app is a mobile application that seeks to make banking simple, accessible, and rewarding for all Filipinos, from the financially literate to the unbanked. Customers have the convenience of effortlessly opening a bank account, managing their daily transactions, and seeking assistance with just a few taps on the app. The platform is seamlessly integrated with one of the nation’s largest retail networks and loyalty rewards programs, enabling users to earn rewards for each transaction. This feature brings users closer to their financial goals.
The design team describes the app’s user interface as consisting of fully customized design components and content that comply with global accessibility standards. Components were created using a token-based design system, ensuring consistency in meeting all relevant World Wide Web Consortium guidelines.
“Motion was treated as a tool to make every interaction more meaningful, not just as an accessory, from showing real-time transaction progress to highlighting financial milestones. Vector pictograms were animated in Lottie, elevating customer experience without compromising the app’s size and performance. Along with haptics, animation was also used to make feedback more easily perceptible, bringing more clarity to the way we communicate the outcome of every money decision users make on the app,” according to the team.
In mapping out and designing each user journey, the team leveraged design trends (both in the global and local markets), usability heuristics, and user research. The team started by adopting design patterns that had been proven effective and eventually improved promising ones through heuristic evaluation. The app’s information architecture was determined and is constantly being refined, through card-sorting exercises. User interviews and moderated usability testing are conducted before the rollout of new products and features, further grounding GoTyme Bank’s UI flows on the mental models and behaviors of its target users.
The result is an overall banking experience that is perfectly in sync with people’s needs and expectations: discoverable functionalities, messages delivered using our customers’ language, processes broken down to their simplest forms, guidance and support right when they’re needed the most.
The GoTyme Bank app is available on both iOS and Android.
Positive UX
A mobile banking app’s performance is crucial for user satisfaction, and all around, it does seem that GoTyme Bank’s app has come to be known for its smooth navigation and functionality, contributing to an overall positive user experience (UX).
Last year, GoTyme Bank was recognized by international design award-giving bodies The Red Dot Design Awards 2023 and UX Design Awards 2023 for the GoTyme app and kiosk that bring world-class user interface and UX to its customers.
Further, GoTyme Bank app was recognized by the Design for Asia Awards 2023 and Creative Pool Awards 2023.
Silvano D’Orazio, Tyme Group head of UX and brand, said at the UX+ Conference 2023, a conference for aspiring and seasoned user experience professionals held on September 17, 2023, at the SMX Convention Center Manila: “Good design is simplifying people’s lives and giving them dignity when embarking on an unfamiliar journey. It’s not about creating something simple; [that’s] not enough. It [has to be] part of a story.”
He added, “You have to consider a different timing, a different journey, a different journey within a journey… You have to consider the whole story.”
Filipino designers
The Vietnam-based design team employs Filipino talents JM Elimanco, Isabel Abella and Christine Enerlan.
Elimanco, senior UX writer, is in charge of designing GoTyme’s content for the app and kiosk. He says, “GoTyme deserves all the international design awards it has won because the team designs with the customer needs in mind. We don’t just copy what other banks do— we refine and improve what’s already out there and validate our assumptions through research and testing.”
Abella, senior product designer, ensures that the “experience with each product and feature is tailored to the needs and preferences of the Filipino customers.” She adds, “We don’t just craft beautiful designs. We prioritize delivering an exceptional experience to the users. We launch products that are carefully developed in a user-centric and data-driven approach.”
Senior UX researcher Enerlan studies “what matters most to the customers.” She claims, “We pay close attention to what the customers think, say, do, and feel about the services. Listening to them is a daily activity.”
While everyone has responsibility to prevent a scam incident—financial institutions, law enforcement, and consumers—the latter plays the biggest role in protecting themselves.
