Overview

UX and UI | B2C | Consumer Fintech | Neo Banking | Mobile App

Times One was designed as an end-to-end mobile financial app bridging the gap between Times Internet's massive media ecosystem (~550M+ MAUs across TOI, ET, TP, Cricbuzz and Gaana) and instant digital lending powered by HDFC Bank.

The primary objective was to convert high-intent media traffic into active credit customers through a 3-minute digital onboarding experience, followed by a feature-rich card management dashboard.

Project

Team: Times Card, Times Internet
My Role: Lead UX Designer
Timeline: Q3 (Jul 2022 - Sep 2022)
Resposibilities: Leverage existing research data, End to end UI and UX, Competitive Benchmarking, Wireframing, Design Trade-Offs, Prototyping and Final Testing.
Cross Functional Partners: Chairman, Business Head, Product Manager, Engineering Head (3 Engineers), Bank Stakeholders, QA Engineer and Product Manager.

Business Outcome

The project was formally presented to the Times Group Board of Directors in September 2022. The board approved the concept and UX strategy. However, following revised RBI Digital Lending Guidelines and tightened PCI DSS compliance mandates which restricted non-banking entities from handling KYC data and credit pipelines directly. Board members strategically paused the public rollout until compliant, bank-led co-branding operational frameworks matured with HDFC Bank.

Client Goals

Manage Outsourced bookkeepers
Insights to grow business
Do only what matters the most
Automate the process

Project Objectives

Reduce manual effort in reconciliation, auditing and month-end closing through AI automation.
Increase visibility and control across multiple clients and workflows in one unified view.
Minimize cognitive load by reducing back and forth navigation across multiple screens.
Enable collaboration among accountants, accounting firms and clients with contextual tools.
Build trust in AI-powered automation while keeping business values and transparency at the center.

Methodology

Design Audit and Research

• Usability Issues

• Contextual Inquiry

• Design validations through user interviews

• Demo Videos - Grain & Looms

• Analysis from engineering support (ES) tickets

Competitive Analysis

• Otelier
• Bill.com

• M3
• InnFlow

Design Proposal and Validation

• Ideal User Journey

• Lo-fi flows - Figjam/Paper

• End user representatives and internal stakeholder's feedback
• Visual Journey

• Design Revision/Closure

Implementation and Design QA

• Dev hand-off and Grooming

• Engineering epic and tickets

• Testing

• Users and Stakeholder's Feedback

• Validate and Improve

Important Terminologies

Transaction Categorization: Classifying financial transactions into appropriate accounts (like expense, income) for clear bookkeeping.

Reconciliation: Process of matching transactions in accounting books with bank statements to ensure accuracy.

Audit Scan: Automated check that identifies anomalies, variances and errors in the books for review and correction.

Month End Close: Final step of accounting to ensure all books are reconciled, anomalies resolved and financials locked for reporting.

Design Audit and Research

Design Audit

Conducting a heuristic evaluation, evaluators compare a predefined set of specific usability principles with a product, app or website interface while attempting to accomplish actual system tasks.

Research

To deeply understand the day-to-day challenges accountants face, we conducted contextual inquiry by visiting their workplaces and observing them in their real work environment.

Key Findings 💡

Tasks

Accounting - Clients/Businesses

Dashboard

Note : Only a few key screens are presented here. A detailed analysis of all screens was conducted and factored into the design process.

Key Issues

Aesthetics & Minimalism

User Control & Freedom

Navigation

Error Prevention

Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors

Users Trust

Spend days in month end close

Back and Forth - Disconnected External Integrations

Takeaways from Contextual Inquiry 📖

Identified inefficiencies in multi-screen navigation and slow workflows.
Manual categorization and missed anomalies are full of hassles.
Very familiar with excel like structure.
Have a workaround for minor bugs but did not report them.
Bookkeepers want automation, but still need manual control on low confidence items.
Accounting firms want visibility across multiple clients in a single view
Business owners want simplified views and insights.