Shaping finance by design

GeorgeUX 2023 highlights

11 min readOct 20, 2023

After following George UX Conf streaming last year, it was thrilling to attend this year’s edition held in Vienna. The event is made by designers for designers, and features a full day of top notch talks around finTech product design. Here’s a nifty glimpse into conference topics:

Welcome

Maurizio Poletto, Erste Group

In his opening speech, Maurizio discussed the evolving design culture at Erste Group and his memory of being inspired by the first neobank, Simple. Today, with neo-banks being commonplace, AI more human-like, and companies’ design maturity increased, Maurizio predicts a shift towards designing relationships.

[Writer’s note]. I remember Simple vividly as well. My co-founder colleagues and I used it as a model for simplicity and accessibility for Selma.

How Revolut Designs Simple Digital Products for the World

Maria Herrera, Revolut

Maria equipped the audience with a “survival kit” for going through a bigger redesign — with dispersed product teams.

Friends, warriors and wizard — with a clear mission. The often invisible and critical job of getting people collaborating and trusting each other, to work towards the same goal.
A map to every corner. Getting a shared overview of the whole service.
Time machine. Analysing the history and the past product decisions.
Little bit of magic. Providing professionals creative freedom; balancing the design system requirements and out of the box experiments.
User compass. Relying on user insights.
Pen and paper. Continuing with the design beyond the official launch.

During the Q&A, Maria emphasized top-down allyship, meaningful KPIs, and allowing people the time and space to excel in their roles — such as leads nurturing the team, while individual contributors focus on their craft.

Leads’ enthusiasm to support a design-centric culture and to provide people with tools and time to do their job well is a necessity. Without practical encouragement via budgets and time, everyday creative work is painful — if not impossible.

Ubuntu Design Framework

Batsirai Madzonga, ADIB

Batsirai linked their experience with growing in a nurturing community to using collective knowledge and experts’ view in RnD.

Batsirai summed up their communal experience through getting support from the extended family, celebrating life and death, sharing work load, resolving disputes together and upholding social values. With these values as a basis for “Ubuntu design framework”, he mapped four collaboration perspectives:

Individual. Relationship, growth, proactiveness.
Community. Workshops, collaboration, contribution.
Family. Delight, reliability, excellence
Interconnectedness. E.g. shareholder engagement

Rather than giving “one solution to solve it all”, Batsirai suggested to start with these values in mind, and pick-and-mix methods on the go. For instance, Batsirai’s team used an influencer map and a speedy “1 hour design sprint” to ensure getting the right people involved.

Pulling the right decision-makers in is vital for things to move forward — and to save the team from redundant work.

Insights Center, Rocking the Financial UX through Research

Natalia Heredia López, Marc Caparros, CaixaBank

Natalia and Marc demoed CaixaBank’s 500m2 research center and their insights into researchOps.

CaixaBank’s research hub in Barcelona features mockup shops, ATMs, waiting rooms, home setup and a lab. In their talk, Marc and Natalia showed how the research lab works and suggested 5 researchOps tips:

Be relevant. Think of business goals, biases and diversity in all research.
Be agile. Involve product team in research to get the most out of it.
Be rigorous. Balance between numbers, speed and communication.
Be persuasive. Storytell the results and spotlight opportunities vs. errors.
Be brave. Test out research methods, especially with the decision-makers.

In the QA, Marc encouraged to think about research in a wider sense. For example, CaixaBank’s research hub has now become an attraction in itself, as well as a trust symbol for bank’s customer-centricity.

As a big advocate for show-and-tell, I really believe in research as a vehicle for storytelling, trust-building and creating a stronger brand.

AI vs Humans: Who Designs Better?

Elif Alp-Marent, Julian Moser, BitPanda

Elif and Julian described how AI and human motivations pair up, and suggested tips on using current apps within the “double diamond” space.

Designer want to locate and understand problems, and advance towards added empathy. AI generate sensible and plausible outcomes (unless otherwise specified 😅) and focuses on efficiency.

Elif and Julian suggested incorporating AI, especially during divergence and consolidation moments — in other words, outsourcing tasks that you would rather not do, or want to get sparring with.

In practice this could mean, for example, mood-boarding, spellchecks, summing up notes, and automatically finding the first round of highlights from the conducted research. As the tools evolve, also the limits of support expand.

The current AI tools are crafty utilities (ethical and legal topics aside). Using the emerging apps for more labours tasks or to “jumpstart” work is quite helpful.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves about Design Systems

Stephen Hay, Rabobank

Stephen provided candid insights into the current state of design systems (DS).

Stephen considers design systems as a documentation of micro-decisions that other people would use to make their own micro-decisions. Because of this specific layer, he suggested to inspect the current state of DS’s through a lens of 7 lies:

Lie: Most DS are more than simply glorified component libraries. To make design systems work, designers should seek to understand the whole system
Documentation is optional. Good systems should show only essential components and serve educational purpose. Also beign tech agnostic could make DSs more elegant.
DS strive to be completed. Keep systems simple and grounded in the current reality. A system like this is never truly ready.
Atomic design is a linear process. The atomic design is foremost a mental model. Start with the lowest level to support yourself and others in creating meaninful molecules — to be then pushed back in to the system, as needed.
DS should predict the future. This is a waste of time and likely impossible. Consider tools like https://open-props.style/
Having choice replaces thought. The role of DS is to support making decisions, not make their life difficult.
DS are as important as we make them out to be. Stephen sees “documenting beauty” as one of the key purposes of building DS — making aesthetics part of the function and getting a shared agreement on the matter from the team.

In the Q&A, Stephen additionally pointed out that accessibility should be, by now, be “baked in” the design systems from the get-go.

Digital accessibility will soon be required by law. Building an elegantly frugal DS that supports serving all, without discrimination, is becoming a standard.

Illustration Systems: Digital Emotion Management

Ilenia Notarangelo, Ani Karamanukyan, Illo.tv

Ani and Ilenia delved into emotional design and showcased their delightful illustration and motion work.

Illo.tv is a motion design studio working with e.g. Strava, Google and Nature.org. From their highly visual talk, Ilenia and Ani provided a list of client needs that support elevating products with an artistic spark:

Stand out
Bring clarity
Set direction
Perseverance
Reposition
Ownable narrative
Intentional aesthetic

Ilenia and Ani suggested to consider company’s mission and goals, what kind of emotions and thoughts people have around the focus topic, and how to flip these discoveries into an experience to strive for. For example, redirecting environmental anxiety into conscious choices.

Illo.TV does an impressive job in analysing existing visual language and making it more exciting and upscale with motion and illustrations.

From Stale to Stand Out. How We Transformed Wise’s Design System

Cameron Worboys, Wise

Cameron encouraged to find big problems to gain a big impact.

Cameron and their teams took part in a major brand update for Wise. The starting point was bland sameness. Wise was similar to any other bank apps out there, with alike colors, fonts and illustrations. In the complete brand revamp, the team improved everthing: from visual style, UI to DSs — all of which was then eventually flipped with a switch, followed by a major internal and external promotion.

Going after a project of such magnitude needs a compelling story. Cameron recommended to be extra mindful who to get the feedback from and when; how to speak in listener’s language, and how to make everyone believe in the change. After all, even with everyone on board, designing with high standards will be laborsome — doing so with shared support makes it a bit easier.

Read the whole redesign story on the Wise blog.

How We Keep Users Central to Monzo as We Grow

Layla Didarzadeh, Saskia Liebenberg, Monzo

Layla and Saskia showed ways to support self-served research and reminded that talking to clients doesn’t always have to have a scientific (or promotional) reasoning.

Layla and Saskia pointed out three researchOps learnings that they gathered from the rapid growth of Monzo’s product team:

Independent research doesn’t save time. You still need to onboard and support people (e.g. via Slack and office hours) in thinking about the suitable methods, processing results and communicating outcomes.
More research isn’t always the answer. Duplicating efforts is a waste of time. The most important thing is to consider what will be done with the results — and how would others access and work with them. If the previous research already attempted to answer a certain questions, it’s much more efficient to at least start by referring to the existing data.
Not all customer interactions are research. Always going into conversations with business motives might disturb the normal human interactions. There should always be room for simple discussions and connection.

Curiosity makes life easier. Not only being curious about others can bring delight, it can also save time and effort. Most of the time people in the company face more or less the same questions and challenges.

How Google Uses its Conversational Interfaces: Call Companion UI Demo

Riccardo Carlesso, Google

Riccardo demoed a human-like multi-model virtual assistant flow, and introduced the new types of UX questions to address.

Customer support can be challenging as every case is slightly different. People contact organizations with issues of varying level of urgency, from all sorts of locations (home, bus, on the run), and with mixed communication preferences (chat, call, typing address vs. sharing location).

The multi-modal virtual assistant tries to cater some of the cases with more flexible chat and voice bots. The lifelike call bot sounds like a human and can support the varying needs by offering WhatsApp -like chatting, media sharing and location pins — all while on the “support call”.

The UX design comes into play in e.g. analysis of the calls, improving the model and assisting real life customer support for cases that are not yet possible to cater with AI.

While I’m hyped about the tech, I was missing the empathy towards the employment and the work of customer support personnel. People skills are essential. Virtual assistant bots should not replace human connections but instead enhance them.

Enhancing UX Maturity in Designing Financial Services for the Masses

Niels D. Siebenborn, Deutsche Bank

Niels describe the challenges that surfaced with merging the systems of two very different systems and cultures: Deutsche Bank and Postbank.

Niels vividly described the “darkness” the product teams faced in the gigantic migration — from question about multi-branding, to undefined processes and systems.

From the experience, Niels extracted three takeaways:

Provoke empathy to get people involved and excited
Show the data to justify actions and ROI of design activities
Stay true to oneself amidst turbulence and politics

A Tale of Piggy Banks & Pixels: How to Build a Banking Experience for Children and Their Parents

Sebastian Schreibmaier, Zsolt Aranyosi, George

Zsolt and Sebastian described the unexpected challenges of designing financial apps for kids and teens.

A banking app for kids? How is this ethical?

Sebastian and Zsolt justified the matter with a U.S. statistic regarding “keeping the first bank account”: majority of people stick with the same bank (and even the same bank account) they get in their early teens. Since the same customer might be around also as an adult, it could make sense to offer them similar services from the get-go.

When it comes to UX designing for kids, Sebastian and Zsolt recommend to think differently.

Clarity. Simplicity does not always work — some typically “basic things”, like “how much money can I still use”, is be better to explain in detail. It’s better that things are clear rather than simple.
Parents play the key role. If they don’t think the bank app is trustful, or the service is useful, the kids will not get onboarded.
Testing with kids is essential. Especially the answers to self-evaluation, such as “Was this task easy?”, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Go an extra mile. If the idea is to make the app experience delightful, the details (such as lovely motion design) play a big difference.

I appreciate how Sebastian and Zsolt brought up the ethics of designing a commercial app for kids from the beginning.

Sum up

This year’s George UX Conf offered timely topics regarding AI, empathy, relationship building and going beyond the product design methods most of the practitioners are, by now, well versed in.

And then there’s my favourite part: mingling. I know this might divide opinion. I find attending a conference IRL a lovely way to connect with other professionals, and get to know them also on personal level — making work and issues we all face more human. Riksu, Ige, Anita, Max, Jakobo, Jakub, Dina, Phillip, Imesh, and others — you made the evening so lively! 😊

The only bigger thing I was missing was addressing the pressing issues our global world is facing — war, global warming and financial inequality. Some might say designers can’t solve these issues. I believe that designers are well-equipped to at least raise awareness within their organisations and nudge others to care and get involved.

Perhaps next year we would see more topics that touch upon subjects such as sustainable economy, social causes and encouraging financially able people to support such activities via (commercial) products.

See you next time!

Hosts

The conference is hosted by George Labs. If you have an interesting topic or know someone who should be on the stage, ping them in LinkedIn. 😊 You should. They are really nice!