Banking on Glass
Lessons from prototyping consumer banking propositions on Google Glass by bb teams in London & Norwich
We recently got our hands on a set of Google Glass and spent some time experimenting with consumer banking propositions on the device. We wanted to get a sense of the opportunities and challenges that will emerge in the coming years as wearable devices enter the fray.
You may be wondering why we’re posting about Glass at all. Isn’t this a piece of technology which has fallen out of favour with much of the tech world (or at least the press that represents it)? Is Glass even going to hit mainstream at this point? Haven’t all the ‘first impressions’ posts already been written?
Well, ahem, yes. But based on our experience designing and building for Glass is a pretty valuable learning exercise. It’s well worth the investment for anyone in the broad church of ‘digital’ who’s keen to get a sense of where things are heading.
Firstly, forcing yourself to start thinking about how your work will look and behave on another set of new screens and form factors is something you need to be doing. It bends your mind a little but we’re betting this will pay dividends.
On a deeper level, wearables and auxiliary devices like Glass demand that we reassess how we build services and get a better understanding of the role they play in the lives of customers. That will be the focus of the second half of the post.
Boil it down till there’s almost nothing left
That’s the first lesson you learn when you start designing for Glass. You quickly realise that many of your go-to design solutions and long held assumptions need to be cast aside. The user inputs are pretty limited when compared to a touch screen or desktop, which means it’s only suitable for the most simple of tasks. And voice commands, while great in many instances, aren’t exactly ideal for many banking tasks because of privacy concerns.
Take our ‘stock alert’ feature as an example. Anyone could build a stock alert app. One real value add for any bank offering this service would be their ability to process trades for customers, so we knew this was functionality we wanted to include. We played around with a few different ways for users to action trades from stock update cards and came to the conclusion that initiating a trade via a phone call would actually be faster, easier and more reliable than bumbling around on Glass. We decided to let users invoke the native phone call functionality for this task rather than try to push a square peg in to a round hole.
“Would this just be easier on a phone?”
This question proved a useful acid test in deciding which features were suitable for Glass. In the same way that tablets tend to be used for consuming media rather than creating it, Glass’ natural place is as an auxiliary to the phone.
With it’s limited inputs, Glass is very much about getting small actionable pieces of information such as checking your balance or getting an alert when your balance is low. Mobile is still the best device to top up your account on the back of that alert.
Excuse me, where do I put my brand?
Applying these same reductive principles to design, you quickly realise there’s not much room for any “make the logo bigger” requests. On the branch finder we managed to sneak in a splash screen (with room for a logo) and animation that weren’t too ornamental, though even that was a stretch.
Interestingly, Glass almost forces you to break brand guidelines. We were playing around inserting logos of some of our clients and realised that most of them didn’t translate well on to a tiny screen with a black transparency, especially the ones with black in their logo!
Designing for glass is akin to sitting next to a terse Scandinavian creative director who murmurs ‘extraneous…’ on loop.
When you can’t inject your brand through visual design, it becomes even more important to think about the interaction and service you’re offering your customers. In fact, if you’re a bank, pretty much the only thing customers would take away from using your Glassware would be the functionality you offer. How relevant is the feature? Did it interrupt me or help me? It’s more complicated than that of course, which takes us nicely to the second section of the post.
Going beyond the basics
As you’ve seen, our first Glass banking features are all low hanging fruit — slightly obvious, quick to prototype and wouldn’t be difficult to implement. And most of the Glass apps out there have pretty similar characteristics, at least for now.
As soon as you start to push your concepts in to deeper waters, however, you quickly realise
the real challenge in designing for devices like Glass isn’t building the app, but nailing the backend service
A large part of Glass’ contextual functionality is controlled in the cloud. A server side component is required to act as the ‘brain’ for any services provided via Glass. Monitoring user information streams and deriving some kind of understanding of that data is key to providing truly contextual notification cards. These services also need to provide data reactively to user invoked services on the device. The technology used isn’t really important, but doing this well requires web as well as Android dev chops, supported by other specialist skills to understand and act upon user data.
The Glass APKs, by comparison, are wonderfully small and build quickly.
To borrow heavily from Benedict Evans, Google’s vision for computing is one in which ‘dumb’ devices are largely the end point for an intelligent web service — it’s fundamentally different from the app paradigm on mobile, where most of the heavy lifting tends to be done on device. The best example of this type of service is Google Now, which is all about pre-empting user needs and delivering “The right information at just the right time”.
When you start approaching design from this angle, the screen / device starts to become immaterial, it’s all about the service. This raises an interesting point for banks, and service brands in general. For anyone wanting to push the envelope, simply having a nicely designed app may not cut it in a the not too distant future.
But if you’re going to design a service that augments someone’s reality, you better have a good idea what reality they want to live in, and where your service fits in to their lives.
That’s not to say that every brand could, or should, offer something as involved as Google Now. But the point is, if you aren’t packing some intelligence in the cloud, you’re just delivering dumb notifications. Noise. Fluff.
The advent of Glass and other contextual wearable devices will hopefully force banks to consider how they can intelligently interact with their clients in the right place at the right time, to ultimately improve the client experience across all contact points. Getting this right is important. Spamming customers with marketing messages or unnecessary updates whenever and wherever they are is not the goal here. We’ve already seen notifications abused on mobile — hands up if your notification centre is a graveyard — Glass could easily go down the same route.
All of this screams out for banks and many other businesses to seriously consider how they can apply and learn from the information that could now be available to them through wearable devices — location, usage and interaction habits and patterns, plus recognising anomalies — to enhance customer information already available to incrementally improve this experience.
Making this functional requires some smart processing and algorithms to figure out what is relevant and when it matters most. It’ll also be necessary to take into account individual user preferences when deciding when and what to send. From our experience, it’s not an area banks are concentrating on enough, or are positioned well to excel in the next year or two.
With device penetration so low it’s clearly not time for banks to start rolling out Glassware. Though it’s probably a good time for service brands to start thinking about the role they want to play in the lives of customers as new devices start to emerge. Perhaps more importantly, they need to start putting in place the technology required to build the intelligent services that Google Glass and devices of it’s ilk demand.
Written in collaboration with my prototyping buddy @shaunchurch who did all the dev work. We both work at Brilliant Basics. Please fell free to get in touch if you’d like to continue the conversation.
