Strategies for building better mobile banking apps

Came across this excellent blog by Scott Bales: 9 Strategies for Building a Great Mobile Banking App. Key takeouts for me included:

Get out of the building: This is a no-brainer for anyone working in UX, but for many bankers needing to actually talk with customers to get feedback can be a scary challenge indeed. As Scott points out “You need to understand where and why people choose to engage your mobile application. Is it because they want to pay bills on their daily commute, do they need to check how much they have to spend before they go shopping.”

Enlist partners: Your organisation probably doesn’t have the complete skillset required to deliver a meaningful, engaging customer experience. Bring in the expertise you are lacking to deliver a superior product.

Remove strings: Ever install an app only to discover the first screen you experience is asking for a login you have forgotten and no way to retrieve your username or password? Chance are that’s about when you decided to delete it. Create friction free value propositions. Creating hurdles for onboarding only works to create frustration.

Leverage Personal Context: Create experiences that support the user’s expectations for personalization. Think about where and why a user is engaging your brand, what value or insight can you show to heighten the delight of engaging your brand.

Build engagement: Give users a good reason to keep coming back to your app, but be careful, this does not mean sending push messages for every marketing offer you come up with!

Make Mobile Banking Simple: Less is truly more when working with limited mobile real estate. Think about the features and UX you are building. Often it’s better to take away rather than add.

Build an App Unlike Your Website: Mobile is about an contextual ecosystem. Use that ecosystem as an input to driving value. Each and every pixel on the mobile screen is vital, so use it efficiently, yet elegantly.

Test and learn: Leverage Lean UX. Build MVPs and deploy to pilot groups. Fail fast (and most importantly cheap) until you find the right user experience.

Focus on performance: Users will not tolerate waiting second for an interaction to complete. You are competing against Facebook and Paypal in this respect. Test in the field and on different connections / devices.

The full post is a great read. You can find it here.