Designing Digital Wallets: Key Principles of UI/UX, and Emerging Trends

The main problem that users and businesses alike face in the digital wallet industry today is the abundance of features. The developer’s trap is to do as much as possible, which usually ends with a total usability failure. You may get the point by browsing Behance or Dribble a bit – take a look at the newbies’ design portfolios to see how burdened with fancy features their offerings are.

The bitter truth is that more means less when it comes to intuitive, user-friendly, and responsive wallet design. As a product designer with 5+ years of experience in Fintech, I reviewed the key mandatory and optional features that can improve your digital wallet UI and contribute to personalized user experiences and satisfaction. 

I shared my experience accumulated through years of work on wallet design and explained which e-wallets have higher chances of launch and flawless operation. I also explored the top design trends and excellence tips you should know before choosing an e-wallet app development company and starting your work on the digital wallet. 

The More Features, the Better ? 

A functional and feature-rich e-wallet is one of the hottest FinTech trends today, as such wallets simplify all kinds of transactions in the modern digital economy. Thus, proper design is really critical to the e-wallet’s market success because it is responsible for making the wallet relevant to the user’s needs and distinguished from dozens of competitors. 

You may be deeply wrong when thinking that your app needs 50+ useful features. In reality, it may do with much fewer features, and the development cost will go down manifold if you concentrate only on the significant functions. 

The most common design flaws of existing e-wallets are: 

• Feature redundancy. 
• Absence of brand identity. 
• Fuzzy and ambiguous content.  
• Lack of engagement. 
• Focus on data, not ideas. 

The good news is that they are avoidable. Your ability to prioritize is what makes your design unique and enhances user experience; this is what you can do with the help of experienced Business Analysts.

Key Principles of Effective Digital Wallet Design 

If you follow the most significant digital wallet design trends, you will see that simple, laconic, and visually clear designs rock today. At the same time, your wallet’s functionality should be extensive and advanced to meet tech-savvy users’ requirements. What’s more, the app should stand apart from the competition due to some unique features or sizable usability advantages. 

How can you achieve this winning combo in the process of wallet design? We recommend keeping to the following principles: 

• Mobile-first design. The world has irreversibly gone mobile, and FinTech products should be designed with this new reality in mind. To make your app optimized for mobile users, you need to introduce touch-friendly navigation, a simple and visually clear menu, biometric features, and the like.  
• Simplicity and usability. To make the app usable, you should minimize the learning curve and simplify onboarding. This may be done with microinteractions, availability of embedded prompts, 24/7 support, avoidance of complex banking terminology, and quick loading time for ultimate usability. 
• Clean, minimalistic UI. Your path to success is a simple user journey. Use white space wisely to direct users to the right menu categories and tabs; simplify the banking language and leave only the minimal amount of needed information. The simpler the navigation is, the higher your chances are to avoid user frustration. 
• Accessibility. Digital app usage should be universally accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. Thus, you should incorporate voice prompts for blind and visually impaired users, allow color and font size adjustments for people with visual impairments, and simplify navigation in a way that makes the app usable for every user regardless of their physical and cognitive ability. 
• Comprehensive security. Enhanced security features should be one of the main design priorities, as digital financial transactions bear unique risks for users and businesses. 

Looking at these rules, you may see that the best UX practices in FinTech are rather easy to master. Optimal UX rests on three pillars: trust (human-centric design), transparency (clear and understandable copy and prompts), and simplicity (easy and logical digital wallet user flow). The fourth principle relevant to some markets is inclusivity. 

Design Process for Digital Wallets 

How does the e-wallet’s design process take place? Here are the three main stages we at RNDpoint employ to design an e-wallet from an idea to a workable interface. 

#1 Preparation 

The initial stage refers to the planning and preparation of the design roadmap. It is hard to reach a destination point if you don’t have a map of the local area, and the same goes for design. Thus, we design a roadmap with all details and nuances, with its further breakdown into sprints. Each sprint is allocated one or several smaller tasks, and the sequence of work on the e-wallet becomes more predictable. The final stage is analytics of the plan, which includes a critical review of the role model and user segments (we use the JBTD or User Story Format here), which culminates in a detailed, transparent description of the user journey. The latter may be presented in a simple visual form or be prepared as a Customer Journey Map (CJM) video sequence. 

#2 Geometric Design

At this stage, we perform low-fidelity wallet app wireframing to see what our ideas and plans look like on the screen. The visual design stage gives us a visual style of the product, which is then translated into high-fidelity UI mockups. Once the mockups are ready and look good, we perform their UX testing with a focus group with the help of interactive prototypes. This is done to test our usability hypotheses, receive real feedback on the degree of user-friendliness, and introduce key improvements. 

#3 Development Support 

This is the final stage of design work, which presupposes the transfer of documentation to the development team. We create an approved set of development tasks and design documents with a detailed layout review to simplify the development procedures. The final part is a thorough UX testing of the final product with a focus group for final feedback collection. Based on that data, we produce an assessment of whether the interface design is successful and adjust the app development roadmap accordingly.    

Top Design Trends Shaping the Future of Digital Wallets 

Let’s take a look at a couple of emerging FinTech trends that you should incorporate in your e-wallet solution. They are sure to become the new normal in several years, if not months, so being proactive is sure to make your app relevant and popular for a long time. 

#1 Voice Navigation 

The ability to perform operations within an app with the help of voice is a next-gen feature that many users love. It’s much easier to conduct voice-enabled payments while driving a car or when on the go; therefore, the feature has become immensely popular in the modern, fast-moving world. Besides, it is a great contribution to e-wallet accessibility, which works well for visually impaired or immobilized user populations. 

#2 Endless Personalization 

Contemporary users are pretty demanding in terms of customization and personalization. Therefore, they want flexibility in everything, from feature selection to UI design. You can attain a greater level of user satisfaction by offering personalized themes, color selections, layout arrangements, and custom-tailored financial products. 

#3 Biometric Authentication 

While a password, no matter how strong, can be cracked from an external location, your biometric data always stays with you. That’s why the developers of apps with sensitive data and assets, like e-wallets, have adopted a wide range of biometric authorization measures to help users keep their accounts safe. You may set up access to user profiles via fingerprint scanning or implement facial recognition technology on devices of a more recent generation to guarantee that no unauthorized party will hack the users’ accounts.

#4 Microinteractions and Animations 

The microinteractions design is a new trend in the app layout that works towards hyper personalization and usability goals. With micro-interactions, you can easily give users visual feedback and guide them through the core UI elements. Animated user interfaces target the same goal by increasing the app’s interactivity and boosting the user’s engagement. These features make apps more intuitive, engaging, and easy to use by simplifying onboarding.  

#5 Data Visualization 

Visual data representation is much more digestible for a variety of users, regardless of their digital literacy level. This can be done for transaction categorization in a visually clear format, such as, for instance, pie charts or bar charts with brightly colored expenditure types. Visuals work great for many financial purposes, ranging from expenditure tracking to financial planning and investment advice. 

#6 Gamification 

The modern emphasis on the gamified user experience is a response to a departure from the boring banking concept. Using a finance app may be fun, and gamification elements like quizzes and activity rewards make this experience fun and engaging. Besides, FinTech apps incorporate financial education as a gamification element by rewarding users for wise financial decisions, thus contributing to the broader goal of making people more financially literate. 

#7 Service Integration 

Very few e-wallets exist as isolated software products today. More and more businesses employ superapp integration to give their users broader access to the digital services ecosystem. This way, most apps are linked with related services and digital networks that allow seamless payments, transactions, and purchases for a seamless user experience. 

Design Tips for Creating a Successful Digital Wallet 

Many business owners want to develop app like Revolut. However, repeating the success of this digital bank is impossible without understanding the best practices its creators implemented in the app. Here are the main design tips you should keep in mind when planning your mobile wallet design. 

• Add social banking features. People are social creatures, and the modern user’s lifestyle is heavily influenced by social media. Thus, by introducing a social banking feature, you are sure to add the needed social dimension to a digital banking experience. This tip can be implemented by bill splitting (ideal for roommates’ rent payments and restaurant bill payments by friends), joint finance management (for couples and families), and finance prompts for kids and teenagers. 
• Introduce voice command functionality in your app design. The ability to operate your app with the help of voice commands is universally valuable. Be it a person who drives a car and needs to send an urgent business transfer, a student hurrying up to classes, or a visually impaired person who can’t type the required data into small data fields on the smartphone’s screen. Any of these users will benefit from a simple, intuitive voice navigation. 
• Make it simple. At the heart of human-centric design lies the vision of human language and simplicity as the core of usability. Banks and financial organizations are notorious for the ridiculously complicated terminology that laypersons can hardly grasp. FinTech apps should make finance more comprehensible for people, which may be done by using simpler terms or adding an interactive glossary that guides the user. 
• Make it a superapp. The times of mono-functionality are long gone, as people want to access a variety of services in one app. It doesn’t relate to adding hundreds of features into one app but rather presupposes maximizing flexibility within a concrete financial area. This way, you may link users to investment resources, crypto trading and purchase features, and financial analytics. 
• Strive for visual consistency. Users are less likely to feel confused or frustrated if they work with a UI performed in a uniform style, with consistent icons and tabs and responsive designs. This way, the UX will be much more positive and frictionless. 

3 Real-World Examples of Effective Digital Wallet Designs 

If you’re looking for UI/UX best practices and want to follow tried and tested design approaches, here is a list of three top digital wallets popular among millions of users in the modern digital banking space. 

• Revolut. This banking app has 45+ million global users and operates in 160+ countries, holding over €20 billion of customer money. The product has become so widely successful because of an easy sign-up process and a simple user journey with getting a physical or virtual card and starting to use it. It showcases a high level of accessibility because of global access to money and wide multi-currency support. Users also enjoy real-time transaction tracking, smart budgeting and saving tools, crypto integrations, and numerous cashback and reward opportunities. 
• Venmo. The Venmo project stands apart from the competition because of its unique business model. The e-wallet doesn’t charge money for transfers among users and doesn’t have monthly or annual fees for service usage. It allows hassle-free transfers within a social network of friends and people located nearby. Users can also order a Venmo card issued in partnership with Mastercard. The app looks minimalist and engaging, with emojis used to categorize transaction types, and users can enjoy split bills and group expense management via Venmo Groups.  
• Cash App. This e-wallet was one of the first to offer simple and free p2p transaction functionality, which made it popular among younger populations on a budget. At present, it keeps the leadership position among financial apps because of the versatility of supported financial operations (from e-commerce purchase payments to stock investments and crypto trading), the absence of fees, free debit cards, the bill-splitting feature, and instant payments. 

Ready to Design Your Digital Wallet? 

Now that you understand all wallet app design principles and are better informed to make the right choice of features and design elements, it’s time to move on to building your own software product. RNDpoint is one of the leading digital wallet solution providers to turn to with this business idea. We’ve been in the market of e-wallet development for over a decade and can provide access to a state-of-the-art technology stack, in-depth developer expertise with a banking and FinTech specialization, and data-driven insights into the digital banking market.

Due to our сompany presence in the international FinTech industry, we trace cutting-edge trends and can create winning apps in line with your specifications. We’re ready to develop a fully customized digital wallet solution that meets your business specifics and needs. Rely on our experience and dedication to excellence at every stage, from idea development to the e-wallet’s launch. Our white-label software products may also help you reduce wallet development costs without quality or feature abundance compromises.