Currencyfair is a peer to peer (P2P) money exchange online marketplace. Users can transfer their money overseas to any currency for low exchange rates, saving them money.

The goal of this project was to critically evaluate the website and identify problems with the current user experience and make user centered changes, as part of an academic UX proposal assignment.

Solo Project – UX researcher & UX / UI designer

One month (February – March 2021)

New visitors to Currencyfair’s website need to understand what the service is and how it works in order to trust the service enough to use it. This should help Currencyfair achieve it’s business objective of acquiring new customers.

The story

I researched Currencyfair’s current useage on Similarweb.com to discover more about it’s user base.

I discovered a lot of it’s traffic was coming from Facebook and went to the company’s Facebook page and looked at the users that were interacting with the page to get an idea of age, gender, location, education level and lifestyle.

I read reviews on Trustpilot.com to get an idea of the common pain-points users experience, as well as what they liked about the website.

This information helped me to gain insight on the target market audience which informed who to include in my usability testing.

Commonalities amongst users include: age 25 – 45, love of travelling, living/working overseas, working professionals who are generally educated to college degree level.

(All names, photos, locations and any identifying information has been changed in the images included.)

I conducted usability testing with five representative users on Currencyfair’s website on mobile. Scenarios included typical tasks a user might undertake on the website.

The sessions were designed to find out how users feel about the usability of the current website (as-is) and to help identify pain-points.

2. Define

User Pain-Points (As-Is Mobile Website)

New users struggled to figure out what Currencyfair is for / how it works. 

Quote: 

“I understand that it’s for transferring money overseas but I’m not actually sure how it works… Like where does my money go when I send it? Is it direct to my account? Is it safe or even legal? I’d need to figure that out before I would trust it enough to actually use it.” 

New users didn’t see why they should use it / the benefits and were unclear on the USP.

Quote: 

“Why would I actually need to use this? Could I not just transfer it using my normal bank? I don’t really get it, like what is the actual benefit of using this?” 

A primary user persona was developed based on all of the discovery research and helped to humanise the core needs and frustrations from the user’s perspective.

The user starts off feeling good/excited/curious when visiting the Currencyfair website.

The user tries to find information on how to use the service and quickly becomes confused and frustrated by the unclear information presented to them.

The user locates a video ‘how it works’ which is hidden away in the mid section of the homepage. The content of the video, however, leaves her feeling more confused and unclear on how the service actually works/how to use it.

Because a trusted friend recommended the service to them, they decide to sign up anyways.

The user feels hesitant and would feel more comfortable if they could understand how it works and have full confidence that it is trustworthy, safe and legitimate.

In order to address the lack of knowledge and understanding expressed by users, I began to ideate solutions to this problem.

Users struggled to find important information on how to use the service.

Users had to root on the website to find information such as the user guide, video tutorial and FAQs.

Video tutorial to the top of landing page

‘Help’ section in the top burger menu with pages such as ‘FAQs’ and ‘User Guide’

New ‘Chat with an advisor’ feature to request correspondence for queries.

Paper prototypes were developed to quickly sketch out how I might address solutions to the problems found in the discovery research.

Below is an example of a flow I hashed out on paper, whereby I addressed the information heirarchy issue of the video being hidden low down on the Currencyfair websites homepage.

*Note: more paper prototypes were created but aren’t included for the purposes of this demo.

Clicks ‘Get started now’ CTA to sign up for an account

3.3 Lo-Fi Wireframes

I then began to create low fidelity wireframes in Figma. The following wireframes encompass the solutions to the problems identified in the discovery research such as

Users aren’t clear on how Currencyfair works

Users struggled to find ‘Help’ resources.

The wireframes pose the following solutions:

‘How it works’ video moved from bottom of homepage (low findability) to the top (higher visibility)

Created a ‘Help’ section in the hamburger menu with helpful resources for users (FAQs, User Guide & Chat)

3.4 Video Flow

3.5 Help Section – FAQs Flow

3.6 Help Section – User Guide Flow

3.7 Help Section – Accessing Chat Flow

I then began to create low fidelity wireframes in Figma. The following wireframes encompass the solutions to the problems identified in the discovery research such as;

‘How it works’ video moved from bottom of homepage (low findability) to the top (higher visibility)

Created a Help section in the hamburger menu with helpful resources for users (FAQs, User Guide & Chat)

High-fi Prototypes

Following the low-fi wireframes, I developed high fidelity prototypes in Figma.

This case study was presented to my UX class and highlighted the importance of clear, concise and meaningful information to users, in the right place and at the right time.

As this was an academic assignment, this was where the project ended. 

If this were a real life project for Currencyfair, the next natural step would be usability testing of the prototype. This would aim to discover if user’s understanding of how Currencyfair works and why they should use it is improved.