Today, everyone is talking about customer and user experience designing in banking, but far fewer are practicing it. One of the most popular questions being asked design firms is about engineering methodology. While different firms may have different workflows to engineer using UX methodology, this is the workflow we use at UXDA.
Before you start any project, you need to know what success will look like. What do you ultimately want to achieve and how will you measure success? It is imperative that everyone on the team agrees to the ultimate goal. Then document the goal and refer to it daily.
It is easy to get derailed and distracted with so much change in the marketplace and so many options. The team will only succeed with discipline and focus. An agreed upon workflow helps to keep the team on track.
1. Find Pain Points Through User Research
Let’s start reinventing your service banking experience through research of some of the real life banking “pains” that people feel. To do so, you can conduct quantitative and qualitative research, or even buy customer reports published by research companies. Don’t forget about social network feeds, where there are a lot of complaints about the “pain” of banking.
2. Develop Inner Sense of an Ideal Solution
Next, you will need to find out what industry experts think about ideal banking solutions. To do so, you can check Slideshare with plenty of presentations covering how digital banking should work. Also, you should explore banking industry publications, such as The Financial Brand, to get the best in financial expert opinions and forecasts. Finally, definitely check out best rated banking and fintech mobile solutions in Apple’s AppStore and Google Play.
Extract the ideal solution principles list from your findings. Then take these principles into account and rely on them to develop strategy and architecture. These will be important factors, forming the key performance indicators (KPI) used to check the quality of your solution strategy.
3. Analyze Competitive Solutions
Analyze competitors to compile a list of existing banking products and digital banking functions available to your target customers. This will add sense of context to your UX design process. You need to consider how users will perceive your solution on a background of similar services. Explore general patterns and “killer” features.
4. Bring Passion Into User Experience Engineering
We analyze many features, but we also need something more emotional. Something that will make customers love your digital banking, inspire them, and enable them to truly enjoy and benefit from the experience.
So, you should find out what their passions are. Through interviews and polls, you could understand consumer needs and interests. Something that they care about the most.
5. Identify Typical Key Personas
You need to feel what customers feel, so walk in their shoes. To achieve that, clarify all typical characters and draw some user storyboards. Use cognitive psychology to make your characters live, show their problems, intentions, motivations, etc. This will help you to evaluate your solution later from concrete user perspectives.
6. Prioritize Red Route Tasks
Next, identify red route tasks. We have to understand what people want from your digital banking solution. How they will use it to solve their problems. These are key scenarios that we must deliver with maximum speed and simplicity. Actually, we can refer to Pareto here and approve that only 20% of functionality is used by 80% of customers. So, you need to find those key scenarios and make them extremely intuitive and usable. This will generate delightful experience for the majority of your users.
7. Map an Ideal User Journey
We know our business goals, KPIs, and features list, as well as the pains, passions, and needs of our customers. Now it is time to connect the dots on the User Journey Map to help generate your ideal banking user experience.
A User Journey Map combines business and user research data into a visible step-by-step sequence. Use it to identify bottlenecks, key features, and gain insights about your service from user perspective.
With User Journey Maps, you will be able to generate an overall service vision and a UX strategy which will help you to create an intuitive and simple service Information Architecture. Also, you can use card sorting to test it on your customers.
8. Wireframe an Ideal Banking Service
At this stage, you will be able to achieve clear vision of how your service should work from target customer perspective, according to your business strategy. The final step of UX engineering is to map interactions and create wireframes, making clear vision of how users will interact with product to fulfill their needs.
Wireframes deliver the first touch of an ideal product as it should work. Wireframes are used to test the core hypothesis about a solution and check key scenarios from the red route list. It will help you to get an early feedback. After corrections, you will be ready to implement your ideal banking product vision into user interface design.