Words Mikhail Lecaros
Images Maya and Acid House
“It takes a ton of work to put your money where it needs to be. It’s also keeping you from where you need to be with your money. It’s time all that changed.” – An excerpt from Maya’s highly watchable app walkthrough video. The tone is young and outgoing. They don’t know stuffy. But it’s not just the parlance that makes Maya winsome but also the look, feel, and experience of using the app.
Say hello to Maya
At the fore of the rebranding was a new app; no mere aesthetic do-over or corporate refresh, Team Maya conceptualized and built their new platform around what users had come to expect from contemporary fintech. Other apps were content to serve as half-hearted translations of existing IRL banking services transposed into the mobile space. In contrast, the new Maya is a fully realized, all-in-one fintech solution for digital natives that looks and feels like it was designed by digital natives.
Expertly crafted to address everything from day-to-day payments to the fact that 44% of Filipino adults do not have financial accounts, Maya is looking to change how Filipinos think about, transact, and manage their money.
Maya executives say they’re committed to fast-tracking the Bangko Sentral’s goals of “transforming 50% of the total volume of retail payments to digital and expanding the financially included to 70% of Filipino adults by 2023.” And they’re doing this by executing game-changing innovations and disruptive offerings “with speed and urgency.” (Maya pushes out new app features and updates every two to three weeks.)
But Maya isn’t banking only on people’s brains to get them to manage their money more wisely. They also appeal to emotions to get unbanked folks to do the right thing, and Maya is doing it via design. “To truly foster financial inclusion in the Philippines, we must make financial services more accessible to Filipinos. This doesn’t stop at users simply downloading an app—we have to ensure that these platforms are intuitive, seamless, and easy to navigate. This is where well a designed UX comes in,” says Whan Woong Kim, head of Maya’s User Experience and Design.
Just five months after its launch, Maya posted a record-breaking PhP 10 billion (170M USD) in deposits from new customers, making it the country’s fastest-growing digital bank. They had a fantastic message that over a million people heeded. Would Maya have been as successful if the message were delivered by a blah messenger? Likely not.
“Maya’s all you’ll ever need to master your money.”
“It’s not just about being a digital version of a bank, a digital version of a wallet, or a digital version of a wealth manager,” says Kim, who led Huawei’s UX Innovation and Strategy in China and HSBC’s Digital Customer Experience and Samsung Design Europe’s UX teams in London before coming to Manila to head Maya’s User Experience and Design division.
Building on the notion of taking users’ actual needs and usage into consideration versus what services Maya had to offer them, Kim likens his team’s UX design philosophy “to how cars completely revolutionized the way we do things in every aspect of our lives. So what does digital, as a vehicle, mean for our future lives, and how will it transform Filipinos’ relationship with money? That’s the bigger picture we constantly think about.”
“If your money’s gonna be all in one place, that place gotta look clean.” Clean it is, with modern fonts and lots of breathing space. You feel the friendliness in the zesty hues and endearing icons. Plus, it’s easy to use, even for senior citizens—or at least, any smartphone user.
“Make money management feel like a good time.”
UX is paramount in every interaction with the app. It impacts brand perception, engagement, loyalty, word-of-mouth, and referrals. And nothing could be more important to UX design than user research.
Maya Lead UX Researcher KC Shiroma says, “We gather customer feedback throughout the product design process – even as early as when the prototypes are designed. When the app is developed, we do beta releases internally with our employees and pilot users. They let us know what they think and report any bugs they encounter. We also take note of feature wish lists, and we further finetune the experience. When the app is live, we consistently track our users’ feedback from multiple channels. This is a continuous process of iterating and involving our users throughout the process.”
The rebirth of Maya would require more than a new look and features to meet the needs of modern Filipinos. In addition to knowing what people want, researchers need to be sensitive to the disconnect between what makes sense and the fact that we humans are “predictably irrational.” Shiroma explains: “People do not justify their choices with statistics or scientific research all the time. Instead, people also tap into their emotions.”
Apps don’t have to look or sound good to be functional. But great UX makes us feel good and we naturally tend to repeat feel-good experiences.
Maya encouraged people to open bank accounts with an incredible introductory interest rate of 6% on savings and personal goals, a low barrier to entry, and no required minimum balance.
Logic and emotions, message and messenger
Where the old PayMaya app was functional in its approach, with new features added over the years, Maya was designed around anticipating its users’ needs. Building on concepts from international and local design consultants, Maya doesn’t inundate users with superfluous text or graphics upon start-up. Instead, the first thing one sees is the brand’s new logo appearing against a plain background. From there, simple yet effective animations accompany the users’ actions until we get to the main screen, where one navigates the well-thought-out UX through an equally well-designed UI.
Wallet shows you your balance, what you can do with it, transactions, vouchers to claim, and missions to complete to earn rewards.
Icons and text are rendered in functional black-on-white, while the brand’s minty hue is applied judiciously, never overwhelming the user with obnoxious branding. On the main screen, the hierarchy of the app’s offerings is laid out intuitively, with the upper half dominated by clearly marked tabs for “Wallet,” “Savings,” “Credit,” and “Cards,” along with a readout of the user’s current balance. Underneath, a minimalist sensibility is apparent across two rows of monochrome icons denoting the app’s individual services, while the bottom half of the screen features overlaid shortcuts to “Wallet,” “Pay with QR,” and “Services.”
Savings shows your total funds in Maya Bank, and if you’ve set goals for yourself, how much you’ve accumulated per goal, like P5000 or 10% of your target P50,000 fund for a winter vacation in Seoul. And you don’t have to wait till month’s end to know how much interest you’ve earned. Maya tells you exactly how much and serves it up daily.
The visuals are familiar online icons refreshed; the fonts are easy to read. Because guess what? Things that are easy to read seem easier to do. And things that seem easy to do are more likely done.
Fluency and emotions affect decision-making. Fonts have degrees of readability, and they convey emotions, too. Sans serif fonts like Maya’s attract a broad audience because they’re informal, open, and friendly (versus formal, powerful, or authoritative), easy to read, and feel accessible. In addition, Maya’s Tuka typeface feels modern and innovative. And if you know the backstory or notice the bird pecks in the Maya font’s inkwells, then the brand comes across as creative and having a sense of humor.
Services offer a neat array of icons that let you move, magnify, enjoy, utilize, and hack your money. The financial tracking is impressive, and the cashback rewards and perks make you want to keep using the app.
In addition to the visually pleasing interface, the app empowers users to customize their experience according to specific needs. Take, for instance, the list of previous transfers, which not only features complete transaction details (without a need for further tapping!) but also the option to save frequently used recipients, eschewing the need to memorize numbers or rely on your phone’s contacts.
“Sometimes you need cash in a flash.” Turns out we also want class and panache. We just didn’t know until Maya showed us what it’s like to have a seamless range of banking and financial services right in our pocket.
“We took a look at what other FinTech apps have been doing elsewhere in the world,” says Maya Consumer Design Lead Phil De La Torre, noting that their research included examining global trends, regardless of whether or not they were adapted in the Philippines at the time. “What’s happening at a global level as well as at the local level and in other similar markets? It’s important to think big because if we just look at what’s immediately around us, then we won’t innovate, and we really wanted the app to be more than what others were trying to do.”
Maya makes ingenious use of a single “QR” button, sidestepping the confusion that comes with far too many apps’ insistence on spreading “Scan QR,” “Pay via QR,” “Generate QR for Cash In,” and “Upload QR” across multiple sections. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that Maya was designed with what its competitors were (or were not) doing, it was clearly designed with the user experience in mind.
Where other apps allow the inclusion of short text messages that most recipients never actually see, Maya leans into online vernacular, letting users send money with animated gifs and confetti to emphasize actions. Little touches like these help spread delight all around.
Crypto has landed!
Perhaps the most obvious instance of including features users didn’t know they needed is the inclusion of Web 3.0 functionality to empower the user to buy and sell crypto, making Maya the first fully digital bank in the country to do so. While the feature was included in later iterations of PayMaya, it wasn’t as inherently friendly to newcomers as it is here. With Maya, users can access a bevy of informational material (and external links) to learn more about crypto before reviewing the real-time market performances of top currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether—all without exiting the app.
Further tipping the scales on the side of innovation, the ”Savings” and “Credit” tabs inculcate notions of financial planning, encouraging one to invest for the future in a manner consistent with one’s priorities or engage in e-commerce via credit-based transactions. Since launching, these features have become significant parts of Maya’s success, garnering praise for introducing an almost entirely-new audience to the banking world.
Discovering crypto is likened to exploring new worlds. The astronomy metaphor is no accident; Maya Group CEO and Maya Bank co-founder Orlando Vea is fascinated with space exploration and has named many of his projects after spacecraft and lunar and interplanetary missions.
Money has a new look.
While Kanto asked what users could expect from them moving forward, Kim chuckled before going on the record to say, “In every update, there are enhancements, improvements, and new features. We’ll be releasing Dark Mode soon, and we’ll be introducing the ability to further personalize your experience by choosing a username for your transactions. On top of the rebranding, we were building new services and new institutions, so we really keep our minds open in terms of the way we’re working and our priorities. We have so many things on the roadmap that we would love to share, but you’ll have to check them out through our official channels on a regular cadence.”
If the team behind the reinvention maintains the thoughtful, innovative quality of their work across future updates, then Maya’s rise to the top of the Philippine FinTech heap is all but assured. Easy on the eyes and easier to use while boasting no end of features or customization options, Maya is superior to its predecessor in every way and a welcome addition to every Pinoy’s mobile FinTech arsenal. By taking the best qualities of e-wallets and online banks, Maya has reinvented itself into something altogether unique and an indispensable companion for every user’s financial journey.
The only question now is, where would you like to go? •
“We get it. We’re putting it all in Maya.” Easy to open an account, easy to navigate. You learn to grow your money and are enabled to plan save for specific needs. Plus, there are delightful touches that make using the app enjoyable—that’s great UX. Perhaps the best thing is not what Maya added but chucked: the bureaucracy of traditional banks, clearing the path for users to achieve their goals.
Making the New Maya:
A Graphic Design Perspective
When it came to crafting the look of the new Maya app, Acid House worked closely with the Product and UX and Design teams to ensure their output complemented the UX work on the new app.
“We worked on the in-app icons,” says Acid House’s Ivan Despi. “We would initially come up with one or two sketches based on the UI and context they’re developing. The team would also provide sketches from our end, then we’d see what stuck and worked forward from there.”
“The product team wanted to play with different materials,” explains Despi. “They wanted to apply bold textures on an otherwise usual icon design to make the user want to touch and feel them, creating a strong visual feedback. So we played with the forms and silhouettes, but the material had to feel real.”
“We sometimes wondered whether we were doing icons or illustrations because some assets are too complex to classify as icons. But I liked their attention to detail, and we even spent a few days during the development process just to land the right features of the glass, for example, the refraction, the roughness of the material, and how much light is dispersed.”
In addition to finalizing the amount of detail to be shown, a behind-the-scenes post on Acid House’s Instagram revealed that unusual materials like glass, felt, and fur were considered to give the icons a tactile presence, even if they would only ever be experienced on a screen. All told—from conceptualization and UX to UI and design—it’s undeniable that multiple teams’ dedicated collaboration and talents helped make Maya’s (re)introduction a resounding success.
Maya is now available for iOS and Android via Google Play and the App Store. For more information, visit www.maya.ph, or follow @mayaiseverything on Facebook and Instagram.
