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2020

Heymoney

A brief article on designing contract management features for Allianz' »insurance wallet« – a multi-banking mobile app.

Team

Claudia Ciarpella (Sparring),
(Francesca Terzi, Monika Litzinger, Aris Dotti, Fabian Schröbel)

Role

Product Designer

Responsibilities

Concept, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Context

When I started working for Heymoney, they had just created a new design team consisting of two designers (Francesca Terzi & Claudia Ciarpella). Together with Monika Litzinger, I was hired as an external designer, working for Syncier.

As an Allianz-linked company, Heymoney had to do a great job in handling Allianz-related contracts. In general, there was a challenge that occurred quite often: Balancing Allianz-specific features with universal multi-banking app features in a way that non-Allianz customers won’t feel left out or – worst case – would even feel like they’ve landed in an interactive Allianz ad of an app. (Back in early 2020, the strategy involved rolling it out to non-Allianz customers, too)


Among global initiatives that helped bringing structure to the newly established design team and its assets, my main job was taking care of the contract management features on Heymoney.

There were two main opportunity areas within the topic of contract management: contract cancellation and contract optimisation (switching to a better value contract).

The following article focuses on the contract cancellation features.

How to Cancel a Contract in Germany 🙃

In Germany (as of 2020), cancelling a contract of any kind can be quite a hassle. Many companies require a signed cancellation on paper. In addition, contractees have to make sure that they clearly state their cancellation, specifying what contract they want to cancel and by which date.

So in order to cancel a contract, people usually have to

  1. Spot the unnecessary contract

  2. Check the payment and renewal dates

  3. Search for the provider’s contact details

  4. Search for contract ID

  5. Formulate a cancellation letter including cancellation date and contract ID & sign it

  6. Print the cancellation letter

  7. Packing & franking the letter (if you don’t happen to have a fax machine)

  8. Sending the letter

  9. Hope that your cancellation made it through

  10. Ideally hearing back from the contract provider

Now the great news is that for steps 5 to 8, services already exist that do the job for you – and they also offer an API that does that. At the same time, Heymoney offered contract overview features that complemented those, covering the first few steps in the process above. So the challenges were quite clear:

  • How could we seamlessly combine the cancellation service (API) with Heymoney’s existing contract overview features?

  • How might we make people feel safe and guided during the cancellation process?

  • How might we make a cancellation feel effortless (– handle as many tasks for them as possible, even the ones that the API does not cover)?

Contract Cancellation with Heymoney

For the MVP, IA-wise and having in mind that cancellations should not be the users’ daily business, the placement of the cancellation feature was quite clear: On the respective contract’s detail page, where all the contract data is already gathered. From there, the user enters the wizard that guides them through the cancellation step by step.

To not leave users alone after they have sent their cancellation via the app, a follow-up dialogue on the respective page asks users to provide a quick update on whether the cancellation worked for them.

Another challenge was assisting the users during all error cases that may eventually lead users to lose money (e.g. the cancellation got rejected or something went wrong during its delivery). For those rather intrusive modals and push notifications were designed, that make sure the users are aware of the recent negative updates to their cancellation. I closely worked together with the UX writer at Heymoney to ensure we’re communicating issues in the clearest and least frustrating manner possible.


Still curious about more? I’m happy to share the full flow and all the thoughts I had over a coffee. Just drop me a message!