The Problem

The money-transfer experience had evolved without a shared, research-backed view of the journey as a whole.

The team knew individual screens and features, but we did not have a clear picture of:

• where customers were losing time

• which parts of the experience created unnecessary friction

• whether the existing iconography and visual language were clear across a culturally diverse customer base

• where personalization would genuinely make repeat transfers easier

• how adjacent jobs such as mobile top-up should fit into the broader experience

There was another constraint: this was a regulated financial product.

Not every step could simply be removed.

So the research question became more useful than “How do we shorten the flow?”

Which complexity was necessary — and which complexity were we making customers carry unnecessarily?

What I Needed to Learn

I framed the research around four parts of the experience:

Friction — Where were customers spending unnecessary time, repeating information, or making decisions the product could simplify?

Cross-cultural clarity — Were icons, labels, and visual cues interpreted consistently by customers with different cultural and language expectations?

Relationship memory — Which recipients, destinations, and financial details should the product remember to make repeat transfers easier?

Journey priorities — How should money transfer and adjacent needs such as mobile top-up fit together without competing for attention?

Why I Used a Multi-Method Approach

Early in the project, it became clear that one method would not answer the whole problem.

I needed depth to understand why customers struggled during an international transfer, but I also needed broader evidence to understand which behaviors and expectations mattered across a culturally diverse remittance customer base.

So I designed the research as a sequential mixed-method study, with each method answering a different layer of the problem.

Prior ethnographic research gave me context around how customers approached international transfers and the relationships behind them.

1:1 customer interviews helped uncover where the existing journey created friction, what customers expected the product to remember, and why certain moments caused hesitation.

Journey mapping connected those individual issues across the broader customer experience instead of treating each screen as an isolated usability problem.

A follow-up survey then helped me understand how broadly the patterns from the qualitative research appeared across the customer base.

The methods were intentionally connected:

Interviews helped me understand why a behavior existed. The survey helped me understand how much that behavior mattered across the customer base.

Challenges & Constraints

The research plan also had to work within three realities of the product and organization.

Recruiting without a dedicated research panel
I partnered directly with Marketing to recruit existing BOSS Revolution customers, giving me access to people with real international-transfer routines and relationships.

Designing for a cross-cultural audience
BOSS Revolution served customers from many cultural and language backgrounds who were sending money to loved ones across international corridors. I could not assume that familiar icons, terminology, or financial conventions would be interpreted consistently by everyone.

Working inside a regulated financial journey
Compliance, banking, and recipient requirements meant that some complexity was unavoidable. The challenge was to distinguish necessary complexity from friction the product was creating unnecessarily.

The constraints influenced not only how I conducted the research, but also what counted as a useful recommendation — findings had to improve the customer experience while remaining realistic for a global financial product.

Building the Journey From the Customer’s Point of View

I synthesized the interview findings into an end-to-end journey across five phases:

Awareness → Exploration → Evaluation → Retention → Advocacy

The goal was not simply to document screens. At each stage, I mapped three things:

Customer goal — what the customer was trying to accomplish
Friction — where the experience created hesitation, repetition, or uncertainty
Opportunity — where the product could reduce effort or provide better guidance

This shifted the conversation away from isolated UI issues and toward a shared view of where friction accumulated across the broader customer relationship.

For the first time, Product and Design could look at the experience as one connected journey rather than a collection of individual features.

What the Research Changed

The findings translated into a clearer direction for the money-transfer journey.

Make unfamiliar actions clearer.
Use stronger labels and visual cues where customers were interpreting icons differently across cultures and languages.

Remember what repeat senders already know.
Surface recipient history, previous choices, and relevant context so familiar transfers require less repeated effort.

Together, those changes shifted the experience toward a journey that was clearer for new decisions and faster for familiar ones.

Make the unfamiliar clearer. Remember what is already familiar.

Impact

The redesigned journey incorporated the research findings into both the information structure and personalization of the transfer experience.

Following launch, international money-transfer activity increased by 18% over the subsequent year.

The project also changed how research was used internally. Stakeholders began bringing research insights more directly into design decisions rather than treating research as a separate step at the end.

Takeaway

This project reinforced that reducing friction does not always mean removing steps.

Sometimes it means making an unfamiliar decision clearer.

Other times it means recognizing that the customer has already made that decision before — and not asking them to make it again.

The strongest personalization reduced repetition rather than adding more content.

FINDING 01

One Interface, Many Cultural Expectations

BOSS Revolution customers brought different cultural, language, and financial expectations into the same money-transfer experience. Visual conventions that felt obvious to one customer were not necessarily obvious to another.

In a financial transaction, that matters. If a customer has to stop and decode an unfamiliar symbol, the interface introduces uncertainty at exactly the moment confidence matters most.

The research reframed iconography from a visual-design question into a comprehension question:

Could customers understand an action quickly and confidently without relying on a visual convention that might not translate across cultures?

What changed:
The redesign moved toward clearer visual cues and stronger supporting labels for important actions, reducing how much customers had to infer from iconography alone.

A shared interface did not guarantee a shared understanding.

FINDING 02

Repeat Senders Shouldn’t Have to Start Over

Many customers were not creating a completely new transaction each time they opened BOSS Revolution. They were often sending money to the same people, in the same countries, through familiar financial institutions.

But parts of the experience still treated each transfer like a new decision.

That changed how I thought about personalization.

Customers did not necessarily want more personalized content throughout the app. They wanted the product to remember the parts of the relationship it already knew — so they could spend less time rebuilding familiar transfers.

The opportunity was not:

“Show me something personalized.”

It was:

“Don’t make me tell you something you already know.”

What changed:
The redesigned journey put greater emphasis on recipient history, relevant previous choices, and contextual suggestions, helping repeat transfers feel faster and more connected to the customer’s existing relationships.

The best personalization reduced repetition rather than adding decoration.