Future of FinTech — Key learnings from the George UX Conference
– Takeaways from the expert talks
George UX Conference was hosted in Vienna and online on the 10th of October 2022. The talks focused on the future of FinTech and shaping the industry with service, UX and UI design.
As a co-founder of Selma (a Swiss-Finnish FinTech I built and recently departed from), I was curious to learn from fellow designers in the field. Here are my takeaways from the key talks.
Disruption at the Gates: Unimaginable Opportunities in the Reshaping of our Industry
Chris Crespo, Nordic Fintech Magazine
Chris opened up with a statement about CX. With many FinTechs having similar features, it’s the perceived customer experience that makes successful products stand apart.
Today FinTechs' biggest threat (and, for the witty ones, an opportunity) are the “ignorant” industry newbies. Coming from an alternative industry, or doing financial processes “kind of wrong”, might provide these new players with a staggering competitive advantage.
For example, the South Korean app “KakaoTalk” started as a messaging platform already back in 2010. In 2014, the corporation expanded to “KakaoPay”, gaining 10 million users 20 months after its launch. By Q2/22, the number of subscribers grew to over 38 million. Expanding the chat app to the insurance and banking sectors started to make sense.
[Writer’s note]
Statista’s Global Consumer Survey estimated that 91% of South Koreans used KakaoTalk in May 2021. Yet, KakaoPay is just one of the more “unconventional” FinTech providers. In South Korea alone, there’s also Naver Pay, Samsung Wallet, Payco and Toss, to name a few.
Redesigning core experience
Meylin Bayramyali, Design lead at Wise
Meylin described the messy challenge of redesigning (Transfer) Wise’s IA (Information Architecture) — especially the confusion and vagueness of starting to redesign something that is “everything”.
Beginning with the problem, interviewing clients and investigating the complicated architecture helped to reveal that the biggest issue seemed to be the customer’s lack of awareness. People didn’t know what Wise offered. Clients even kept on asking for the features that were already there.
To approach this challenge, Meylin and her team came up with the hook. In order to excite their coworkers and get space to experiment, they started talking about how lack of awareness slowed down the company’s growth and didn’t pay out for the development already done.
Then, they prioritised progress over process — to experiment with research and a plethora of UI solutions. For example, the team asked clients what do they think the app does. They also created a bunch of designs to fuel the imagination. One such design was done with a creative limitation: “if this app screen would show 4 elements, what would they be?”.
According to Meylin, Wise has thousands of employees and a self-organized culture. To get people on board, designers painted the picture of what winning ideas might look like and what they could achieve. The team’s excitement led to commitment, rapid product development and, eventually, reforming the IA and UI in a matter of 6 months.
[Writer’s note]
When dealing with an ambitious challenge, creating and testing many smaller design experiments can yield better results.
Beyond Banking: Connecting the Dots
Ndubuisi Anyaoku, Lead product designer at Revolut
Ndubuisi explored how financial and travel tech overlap. Revolut Stays was developed based on the idea that “money moves, when and where the life moves”. People use the money to travel — paying for tickets, hotels, and meals; often in groups with shared expenses.
If individuals and groups are using the money for travelling — why shouldn’t it be the financial provider which helps them with certain aspects of travel arrangements and cost management? As a reference, Ndubuisi mentions that JP Morgan has already been among the top 5 travel providers in the U.S. In other words: it’s not unheard of that FinTech goes into travel.
Revolut Stays concerns keeping travel-related bookings, cashback and payment actions in one place, i.e. “being where the money lives”. As more general learning, Ndubuisi suggested thinking of these five steps:
- Start from the intersection between what clients enjoy and where the reciprocal value lies. How to help people grow; and through it, how to grow the business?
- Design and communicate your unique selling points clearly from start to finish. What is it that you’ll give customers that they will not get elsewhere?
- Design with familiar paradigms, and leverage popular brand associations whenever possible. Start simple to remove the cognitive load and to save initial development costs.
- Enhance journeys with timely and relevant cross-sells and services to complete loops.
- Leave customers with change, so they have a reason to come back.
How do we Design for the World?
Muhammed Salim, Director of Product Design for Deel
The original task: building the best design team in the world. The first challenge: only a few applicants and a lack of senior designers.
When Muhammed started seeking and organizing an excellent design team from scratch, his role was sort of a “talent acquisition manager” working with “a world pool of designers”. After thousands of portfolio previews, 900+ pitches and 300+ interviews, the team began to form and Muhammed’s role shifted from recruitment to leadership.
This led him to explore what good leadership means. For Muhammed, it starts with helping designers grow, learn and get a healthy level of challenge.
The role of design leadership also depends on the team’s size and hierarchy. For example, while the lead handles their team’s operations, Head Designer connects the dots between the design leads and their groups.
The design maturity is closely connected to the company’s maturity. As the organisation grows, hiring individual contributors and building meaningful design systems becomes critical. The design system is there not only to help teams to connect and keep the product consistent; it should also evolve over time.
Connecting on a personal level is crucial. In Muhammed’s case, this meant for example hosting weekly online meetings, facilitating “Show and tell” sessions, providing recordings of these sessions for people who were not able to attend, as well as reserving half-an-hour 1on1 check-up talks with the team leads. The idea is that managers are there to empower, not to manage.
Muhammed also mentions defining team culture and its values as an integral part of design leadership. Deel aims to “speed up work” and collaborate with experts who have full autonomy and the ability to self-manage their work. The autonomy is seen in the team’s sprint setup and a way to co-build quarterly roadmaps together.
As a final key takeaway, Muhammed stresses:
- hiring the right few people — someone who wants to grow, in their own way, with the team
- building the system –to help the teams to collaborate
- and empowering the team to deliver faster — in the right way, with full trust and within their best ability
[Writer’s note]
Hearing that team is aiming to “design fast” sounded like a red flag for me at first. The further Muhammed defined what “fast” stands for Deel, the more it made sense in their all-online team’s case. It seems, speeding up doesn’t mean panicking or working in a sloppy way; it’s about building towards meaningful optimisation and consistency, so online collaboration gets easier over time. It’s also about finding ways to exceed expectations. For example, instead of building a termination process for each and every country and regulation, Deel aimed to build one process to suit them all.
Human-Centered Design Leadership
Wolfgang Bremer, Head of Design at Elli
In his talk, Wolfgang described how bad managers are the source of poor motivation and productivity.
As a step one in any leadership work, Wolfgang suggests shutting up and listening. To sit down, view each person as an individual and understand where they are coming from: their goals and motivations, why they chose this team, and where are they seeing themselves.
Only once there starts to be a clearer picture of what the designer needs and wants, the leads should begin to propose suggestions and alternatives.
Getting to know people is about building long-lasting relationships and creating trust. Ideally, this trust spans beyond this particular employment and continues over the upcoming years, e.g. in a form of being an ally, a mentor or simply a good, former colleague.
Wolfgang notes that empowering and building rapport and trust with people is hard. It requires patience, sensitivity and “staying out of the way of their way”. It’s also about providing a meaningful level of challenge. Too much of it — people will feel stressed and drained. Too much stability — designers might get too bored.
As his key takeaways, Wolfgang mentions:
- Listen
- Get out of the way
- Offer challenge and stability
- Stay open: be reliable and approachable, and
- Enable people to be their best selves — so they can do their best work
In the end, focusing on people means more effort in the short term and comes with greater benefits in the long run.
Reframing Finance by Design
Marcela Machuca, Senior Service Designer Nordea
Marcela described her experience working with several different teams, and how the varying level of design maturity has affected her work.
One of her teams was operating at a high speed and focusing on requirements. The design appeared to be a cosmetic function — “putting lipstick on the pig” so to say. The trap of building for requirements and poor understanding of the role made design challenges.
On the other, one of her team was thinking on a rather visionary level. It appeared that while the design value was high, the outcome stayed at a bit imaginary level.
And then again, Marcela’s current team at Nordea seemed to be something in-between. Based on the talk, appears that while there is high design maturity and appreciation, getting the buy-in, committing to create holistic changes, and making things move forward rapidly is slightly challenging. In bigger organizations, there can be many roadblocks ahead.
As a solution, Marcela suggests dealing with such situations with a few tips:
- Ask questions — don’t take the business request at its face value
- Welcome incoming ideas with “yes, and” and test them
- In tests, squeeze out exploratory questions
- Make sure to map out and deal with all the stakeholders
- Sell ideas, with e.g. Business-Experience-Technology -mapping
- Show prototypes
- Get allies
Building towards design maturity isn’t easy, especially in an older, hierarchical institution. As a designer, you might need to work in “pockets” and get allies around you. The more people support your work and ideas, the easier it is to get time and space to concentrate on your work.
Designing for trust
Adam Tillner-Smith, Product Designer at Wise
Digital financial management can be intimidating. Adam talked about some of the key takeaways their team gained when designing for trust.
Design to educate
- Research what are the high-risk moments during the user journey. In the case of a financial app, this might be, for example, the hours and days after the initial transfer — the client might be worrying about whether the money arrived or not.
- Reduce anxiety by offering educational information — with clear language and meaningful layers of details.
- Ensure that the app looks and functions well, especially at high-risk moments when any small errors and inconsistencies might feel wrong.
Promote with care
- research potential discoverability issues
- build for bite-sized, consistent feature discovery
- develop further trust with personalised content
Redefine engagement
- Define where trust can be gained and damaged, e.g. by talking to the customer support specialists
- Have face-to-face chats with the customers yourself
- Think about how to work with the customer beta-groups
Design as a Key Enabler of Change
Juan Aranda Jimenez, Design Manager at BBVA
Juan described the challenge of balancing building a new digital relationship with the customers, while also helping the organization to become more digital itself. This challenge sounded hard, considering BBVA was established back in the 19th century.
The first part (building with clients) appeared relatively straightforward: following design thinking methods, BBVA simplified certain banking features, e.g. paying with QR codes and automating saving up.
The internal change sounded more complicated. Juan shared two successful examples that brought design maturity up improving the team’s connection with design ambassadors and showing the success of a design system.
The Future of Design Tools
Tilman Frick, Lead Product Designer at Tomorrowbank
Tilman is an advocate of front-end prototyping.
In his talk, he described that prototyping in current UI tools, such as Figma, is useful to extend. While such apps are great for sketching out ideas, they do not represent the real end-user experience. Working with static designs (or even simple interconnected prototype screens) lacks micro-interactions, gestures, native inputs and such — ending up feeling ingenuine.
Using React, Tilman created a prototype app using realistic components — images, buttons, icons, drawers, native fields and states. The prototype was connected to the localization platform; also the content creation happened directly in the prototype.
In the end, the outcome mimicked the same experience as in the real app. What started as a little experiment to prototype one-button interaction, over course of the months, ended up improving the entire production workflow.
Tilman’s view is that picture-based design tools (Sketch, Figma, PS) are limited:
“Every design tool that uses an interface will shape the way we design. The only way to overwrite this is by writing code. The product is not how it looks — it’s about how it feels.”
Designing with code enables using all the interactive opportunities that are available in the native world: gyro, maps, touch inputs, camera input, and audio. It allows learning about coding and technical challenges and taking better care of the overall end experience. On the con side, coding can limit creativity and slow down, especially at the beginning. Then again, any learning comes with a learning curve.
And how to get a buy-in from the managers to spend time learning and experimenting? Tilman’s solution was clear: “I didn’t ask”. 😅 His suggestion is to try. “If the current tools are not enough for you — just go beyond!”
Bias now, Pay later — how to Overcome Bias in UX
Carolin Osthoff & Jen Valentine
Carolin and Jen started by referring to the idea described well in the book “Thinking fast and slow” — the two “systems” of our brains.
System 1 works on autopilot and uses as little energy as possible. It’s the easy default. The conscious System 2 reflects and focuses on making well-considered decisions — and consumes tons of energy.
Understanding how these two systems connect to design can validate certain design choices, for example:
- Limiting the steps (e.g. validating the email) will help people to do the least amount of work possible to get the steps done, reducing the cognitive load of System 2.
- Progressive disclosure shows less and offers more
- Giving examples helps to associate and validate knowledge
- Utilizing mental models (e.g. cutting out content to visualise horizontal scrolling) connects to familiar tasks and increases the user’s confidence
- Providing defaults allows people to do less to get the job done while allowing flexibility for those who want to adjust the basic setup
- Creating neutral research questions supports getting actually interesting, unbiased answers. System 1 comes with confirmation bias. For example, suggestive research questions will likely lead to biased answers — “Do you like this app?” resulting in “Sure”. Such bias will be even greater when thinking is done under stress, during emotional events or with significant time investment.
- Getting feedback early
- Detaching emotions from the own design work
Designers are not immune: spending effort on certain designs can accidentally lead to favouring research that supports it. As a solution, Carolin and Jen recommend keeping emotions somewhat detached from the design work, requesting feedback early and often, and letting go — as necessary.
Design for everyone. How George deals with accessibility and inclusiveness
Stefanie Prinz, Head of Platform UI/UX of Erste Group Bank AG
Stefanie talked about the benefit of considering accessibility as a need, rather than a special need. She pointed out that all of us are already using accesibility features that were perhaps initially done for specific groups. These are for example subtitles in apps like Netflix and TikTok and the ability to adjust sound, contrast and text size.
The accesibility is becoming mainstream, and there are many ways how the design team — and ideally, the organization as a whole, can improve it:
- Reducing noise — remove unnecessary actions
- Concentrating on simplicity in UI
- Using kind language — not talking down, not patronizing, making the tone of voice human.
- Using gender-inclusive language, e.g. “humankind” instead of “mankind”
- Setting accessibility criteria at the start of building a design systems
- Being mindful of the details, such as how screen readers treat IBAN numbers — they might read numbers as values rather than single numbers, which is of course not at all what user expects
- Testing with the most diverse group of people as possible
- Onboarding in a meaningful way
- Providing smart in-app recommendations
- Involving everyone in the team to improve accesibility
- Making company management accountable to consider upcoming regulations
Stefanie points out that inclusivity is about thinking about the whole range of human experience, e.g. language, culture, gender and age — “building the thing right”. She sees building for accessibility more as a mindset, rather than a single step-by-step approach. Stefanie also highlights that accessible services are good for business. By making products truly usable, the company gains more clientele and builds towards solutions many people will enjoy.
References
Conference page. Speakers’ LinkedIn: Chris Crespo, Meylin Bayramyali, Ndubuisi Anyaoku, Muhammed Salim, Wolfgang Bremer, Marcela Machuca, Adam Tillner-Smith, Juan Aranda Jimenez, Tilman Frick, Carolin Osthoff & Jen Valentine, Stefanie Prinz
🌻 Slava Ukraini!
