Why User Experience Engineering is a Must in Financial Industry

The essence of user experience engineering

There are millions of problems customers face every day. Any successful business starts with a solution-to-solve problem, but not every solution is usable enough to help customers. Service interface design ensures digital solution usability by matching solutions with user needs and psychology.

Actually interface design is not about art; rather, it is science that impacts user decisions and behaviours. Holistic approaches combine user-centred engineering with business needs and product capabilities to design positive user experiences utilizing financial solutions.

From our extensive financial project work, we have realized that step-by-step financial UX design methodology must include marketing analysis, business expertise, research, psychology, system analysis, strategy and only after all interface design.

The role of user experience engineering

According to scientists, 80% of consumer behaviour is determined by that part of the human brain referred to as our subconscious. Finance is an artificial concept that lies in the neocortex of the brain — our rational consciousness. That`s why people are not adept at calculations and controlling their financial behavior.

Many people don’t like banks because they don’t understand how banks work. The average bank offers many services, but 70% of it's customers use only a few of them. Digital technology can reinvent this system to make it more transparent and user-friendly.

Only through understanding humans is a positive digital user experience possible to make finances more comprehensible for people. That`s why the mission of the UX architects and designers is to raise consumer understanding about financial services by engineering simple, intuitive design.

The impact of user experience on digital disruption in finance

The average consumer’s trust level in banks is about 40% compared with 70% trust level in technology companies. Technology firms design a user experience as part of a value-generating process instead of old-school push marketing.

There is a plethora of financial services, most of which are complicated and confusing. Statistics shows that 50% of financial service customers switch providers because of a bad experience.

Disruptors build technology and finances around customers and deliver needed solutions in a simple way. They don't just build useful and appealing software; rather, they seek to change the whole financial experience for users.

The work stages on financial user experience

User experience design process has to include three key stages: Research, Engineering and Design.

It starts with understanding the business, followed by user research and product-feature audits. Try lean UX, to conduct simple research that provide key insights.

By understanding core product user personas, it is possible to understand users’ needs and gain insights in order to engineer UX strategy, information architecture and user journey maps. Based on those insights, you can implement key screens in wireframes that allow to deliver initial prototypes to test core product hypothesis.

Financial UI design completely differs from traditional web design. Main challenge is to convert complex multi-feature solution into user-friendly, intuitive interface that are portable to different platforms and resolutions. To achieve this, you need to consider usage patterns and habits, usability research, cognitive psychology heuristics and trending UI approaches.

Way to get user experience design from UX agency

Use online communication tools in work with your project. This will allow not to limit yourself with local agencies. All project files and progress will be tracked in the cloud. Design prototypes and interactive concepts should be shared with your team, so they can fully participate in the UX engineering process.

Include daily check-ups, hourly reports and cloud-based interactions in your regular collaboration with financial UX agency to ensure that you have full "flight control". Let UX agency operate as a remote part of your in-house team. Thus, you are not only creating an optimal financial user experience of your service, but also ensure that your team employs best practices in a user-centred approach.

Check out my blog about financial and banking UX design >>