by anandita punj
Designing India's first voice-enabled banking experience for the next billion users.
Introducing Hello Ujjivan - India's first voice · visual · vernacular banking app, built for customers across Tier 1–3 cities and rural India.
9 months
Research & design program
108
User Interview
42
Prototype Tests
500k+
Downloads
Overview
The challenge wasn't translation. It was confidence.
Ujjivan Small Finance Bank set out to accelerate digital adoption across a highly diverse customer base, spanning Tier 1–3 cities and rural India, to enable deeper financial inclusion for the next billion users.
Despite offering a fully localized banking application in multiple regional languages, adoption remained critically low. Customers continued visiting branches for everyday banking and loan repayments, creating operational strain and slowing the bank's digital transformation.
"
The brief was no longer about redesigning the app.
We were reimagining digital banking for users with vastly different literacy levels, language preferences, and digital skills, ultimately enabling seamless banking for millions.
Strategic Reframe
Digital
self-sufficiency.
The industry assumption was: "if the app is translated into local languages, adoption will follow." Our research revealed this was fundamentally flawed.
The Fear Spectrum
For many users, banking represented a high-risk digital interaction. Unlike entertainment platforms such as YouTube or WhatsApp, banking applications introduced fear. Fear of making mistakes, losing money, of misunderstanding workflows, and fear of navigating unfamiliar digital systems.
.png)
RESEARCH & SYSTEMS THINKING
Nine months.
Ten field sites.
One blueprint.
The initiative evolved into a nine-month research and design program: foundational research, ethnographic fieldwork, iterative prototyping, mixed-methods studies and continuous validation.
The goal was not only to redesign a banking application, but to generate new knowledge around designing financial systems for users with:varying literacy levels,diverse language preferences, andvery different levels of digital familiarity.
KEY INSIGHTS
Five truths from
108 conversations.
Drawn from analysis of 108 user interviews with Ujjivan bank customers across India.
FAMILIARITY
Design from what users already trust, not what banks expect them to learn.
WhatsApp and YouTube dominated across all cohorts. Their voice, visual and vernacular patterns became the blueprint for redesign, not traditional banking UI.
VOICE
Voice is not a feature. It is the primary reassurance mechanism.
Users often sought verbal confirmation while navigating digital systems. Voice created reassurance, context, familiarity and confidence during high-risk flows.
INTERMEDIARIES
The product must guide like a person, not merely inform.
Trusted intermediaries - children, spouses, agents; instructed users through tasks. The interface needs to replicate that instructional presence.
.png)
LANGUAGE
A flexible vernacular model, not rigid translations.
Users mixed languages, preferred colloquial phrasing, kept select English financial terms and resisted jargon-heavy translations.
UI PATTERNS
Icon recognition is tied to lived experience, not universal convention
Familiarity comes from repeated digital exposure (mic, keyboard) and physical artefacts (loan card, currency). UI must draw from both.
Building upon existing or familiar mental models is the shortest path to building digital confidence
"
PROJECT STRATEGY
A phased trust-building approach.
Rather than redesigning the entire banking ecosystem at once, we introduced confidence in stages.
01
Simplify the experience ecosystem
02
Prioritise high-frequency, high-value services
03
Reduce cognitive overload
04
Reduce cognitive overload
PROJECT STRATEGY
5 guiding design principles for solution
01
Integrate human or human-like interventions
02
Build upon familiar mental models
03
Design multi-modal feedback to reassure actions
.png){kind=small}
04
Guide, prompt, instruct. Do not merely describe
PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
Two interaction models, working in concert.
MODE 1
Conversational banking through voice
A WhatsApp-inspired layer where users ask in voice, receive guidance and understand actions before committing.
MODE 2
Scroll based navigation with visuals cards
YouTube-style card browsing: visual discovery that reduces the learning curve for first-time digital banking users.
The result transforms the app from a transactional tool into an assistive, confidence-building financial experience.
.png)
CONVERSATIONAL FLOW
VISUAL CARD FLOW
Every screen has a human voice guiding you
Not a tooltip, not a label, but something that sounds like a person explaining where you are and what you can do.
EN
HI
EN
HI
Guide, prompt & instruct
Complex journeys were broken down into manageable steps, guiding users through tasks with contextual prompts and voice-based nudges at key moments.
Breaking down long forms that overwhelm users into a step by step process
.png)
Digital assets were designed from physical ones.
Existing artefacts like loan cards, debit cards; were translated into the interface to reduce cognitive distance between the familiar and the new.
Multimodal Feedback
Reduce dependency on text: Use of audio, and visuals to enable users who cannot read to use digital services.
EN
HI
EN
HI
USER TESTING
Watching real users
navigate the prototype.
The illustrative icon, inspired by the real life setting of loan repayments gives the confidence to the user that this is where she can do repayments,
Early prototype tests of the voice guidance
system. The user, lacks written literacy was able to
navigate the flow with no help
A user in Tamil Nadu, during an early prototype test excited by the verncaular voice function decides to confidently demonstrate how to use the banking app.
42 prototype tests across Tier 1–3 cities and rural sites. Clips capture key moments of confidence, hesitation and discovery.
"
OUTCOMES
Tangible shifts in adoption, trust and reach.
Measured across pilot regions & beta launch of the Ujjivan App over 12 months.
5000+
Monthly fund transfers, projected to reach 5million per month in 3 years
250K +
Customers doing Loan Repayments on App
Projected 1.5 million customer
500K +
Downloads and projected 2million +
4.6/5
User Satisfaction Reported
1st
Voiced-based banking app in India
10+
Vernacular languages and dialects supported which are domain specific for accuracy
Click on closed caption (CC) and switch to auto - translate to select a language of your preference
REFLECTION
A Project of Hope
Where client, customers & teams came together
This project was shaped by countless people: Arjun our tech lead who shared ideas, Akshitha's partnership for UI and visual design, Sameer's mentorship, the insights from Apoorva, the trust of our founders Raoul and Jai and their own participation at every step of the process, and the unwavering support of every person at Ujjivan. Most importantly, it was shaped by the customers who gave us their time, honesty, and vulnerability.
Their stories gave us the privilege of designing something meaningful.
This project gave me a rare opportunity to challenge many of the conventions of digital design and rethink what banking experiences could be.
My biggest takeaway was hope. Hope for design, technology, banking, and what we can achieve when we solve problems together.
"
"Building upon existing / familiar mental models is the shortest path to digital confidence."