GoTyme Bank has won the 2023 Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies (the Museum).

Founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, Good Design is the oldest and the world’s most recognized program for design excellence worldwide. For more than 70 years, the award has toasted everything and anything produced in and for the environment, from a paperclip to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner or NASA Space Ship.

The interface of the GoTyme app is clean and smooth. It's very easy to navigate through and finding merchants is as simple as it gets. All the little animations and colors also make GoTyme an interesting and an engaging app.

GoTyme aims to become accessible across all types of users, from the financially literate to the unbanked. Opening a bank account with GoTyme is fast and easy. Also, getting the physical card only takes five minutes if you stumble onto a GoTyme kiosk -- which I am seeing more and more.

The design team describes the app’s user interface as consisting of fully customized design components and content that comply with global accessibility standards. Components were created using a token-based design system, ensuring consistency in meeting all relevant World Wide Web Consortium guidelines.

“Motion was treated as a tool to make every interaction more meaningful, not just as an accessory, from showing real-time transaction progress to highlighting financial milestones. Vector pictograms were animated in Lottie, elevating customer experience without compromising the app’s size and performance. Along with haptics, animation was also used to make feedback more easily perceptible, bringing more clarity to the way we communicate the outcome of every money decision users make on the app,” according to the team.

In mapping out and designing each user journey, the team leveraged design trends (both in the global and local markets), usability heuristics, and user research. The team started by adopting design patterns that had been proven effective and eventually improved promising ones through heuristic evaluation. The app’s information architecture was determined and is constantly being refined, through card-sorting exercises. User interviews and moderated usability testing are conducted before the rollout of new products and features, further grounding GoTyme Bank’s UI flows on the mental models and behaviors of its target users.

The result is an overall banking experience that is perfectly in sync with people’s needs and expectations: discoverable functionalities, messages delivered using our customers’ language, processes broken down to their simplest forms, guidance and support right when they’re needed the most. 

The GoTyme Bank app is available on both iOS and Android.