Designing for Finance

Ladies that UX London’s October event was all about Designing for Finance.

We had four wonderful speakers share their experiences designing for financial products. I really enjoyed the talks and learnt a lot myself! Having worked in the finance sector myself, I could relate to some of the challenges that the speakers faced or had faced.

The event was held at Aviva’s Digital Garage — it was a lovely space. The auditorium’s modern style made me feel like I was at a TED conference! Anyway, I digress…

Due to the popularity of the topic and more great speakers than we could have for one evening, there will be a part two early next year! So keep an eye out for announcements on our various social media channels.

I will be summarising and reflecting on the talks. All the speakers did a fantastic job in engaging us which was evident by the great questions people had asked at the very end. Each talk offered us unique perspectives but the underlying thread was designing for products or services in finance.

Liv Thompson, Senior UX Designer and Anna Crampton, Senior Visual Designer at Aviva were the first speakers of the evening. Their talk was about “The challenges and process of creating products for people who aren’t engaging to save for their future.’’

The talk highlighted some of the challenges people face in trying to save for retirement. Pensions, after all, aren’t something that people naturally respond to with enthusiasm.

Aviva is the UK’s leading life and pensions insurer. The talk focused on Liv and Anna’s experience of redesigning Aviva’s app so that it better served customers.

Some of the challenges Liv and Anna faced:

• User’s needs not really being met through the app
• Lack of useful information
• Legacy systems of a 350 year old company
• Difficulty engaging key stakeholders throughout the process

Anna spoke of wanting to make the app’s experience ‘more human and conversational’. The priority was to improve the experience of the app so that it could better cater for users’ pension needs.

The hypothesis was: providing key information upfront and progressively disclosing extra information would improve comprehension and cater for novices as well as experts.

Key takeaways:

• They found it a challenge to push for user-centred design when there was limited time and budget
• Stakeholders were more receptive when they felt they were a part of the process and contributing solutions to the problems
• InVision boards were vital for knowledge sharing and live documentation and gave everybody an opportunity to give feedback.

The second talk was given by Meg Porter, Principal Product Designer at Skyscanner. She gave an insightful talk about her experience while working at the FinTech startup dopay.

Her talk “Designing for FinTech” explored the challenges of designing for a highly complex and regulated sector (banking) and reminded us all the importance of having empathy for the people we design for.

Meg’s talk centres on her work at dopay, a FinTech startup which offers visa prepaid card for businesses that only pay their employees in cash. Essentially, she was designing for customers who had never had access to banking in their life. These customers were small business owners in Egypt, Brazil and Indonesia.

Meg was in London, while customers and the team were in Egypt, speaking another language and new to the experience of banking that we might be used to.

The human element of Meg’s story was felt, as she shared her experience of grappling with the fact that she was designing for customers who had a completely different way of life to her and how she gained empathy for them.

The research findings were telling — one customer trying to put their PIN letter in ATM card slots to enter their card’s PIN. A customer who couldn’t read English well, let alone financial jargon. Another customer who couldn’t read so gave all her passwords and PIN to her nephew who spoke on the phone on her behalf.

Personal biases and the challenge of working remotely with a team and customer base in a foreign country which spoke a foreign language were the major challenges Meg experienced.

Key takeaways from Meg:

• Travel more — it’s good for empathy building and good for us designers
• Question your belief systems and the way you think
• In reality, the design process is much more complicated
• Teach the importance of design to others

The final talk, ‘Rediscovering Purpose’ was given by Jenny Coford, UX consultant at ExperienceUX.

At ExperienceUX, Jenny had worked on a variety of projects for clients in the financial services. In this talk, Jenny shared the lessons she learned along the way, including actively involving stakeholders in projects and the power of understanding the people behind the pennies.

Through the various projects Jenny had worked on, what stuck with her the most was the people she was designing for were scared and anxious. In one particular project to improve a global life insurance company’s services, she found that the biggest fear users had was not being covered. The implications of getting the designs wrong were life changing.

The key thing for Jenny was she wanted people to feel supported, not scared. Jenny realised that the strict constraints of the financial industry had the potential to promote creative solutions.

Her learnings were:

• Understand all of the project stakeholders
• Facilitate better conversations between project stakeholders
• Build real empathy for real people

Thanks to all four speakers for their fantastic and engaging talks! Keep your eye out for the next events on our social media pages!