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🎧 Financial UX Design Methodology: the Experience Pyramid

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🎧 Financial UX Design Methodology: the Experience Pyramid

To successfully transform financial services into demanded digital products, we use reverse engineering. It's a top-down approach that begins with defining the ultimate value for customers and ends with an action plan that includes architecture and design. This is the only way to ensure maximum user satisfaction and high demand in the digital age. In this article, we explore proven user-centered design methodologies that help digital financial products stand out among competitors.

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Digital Transformation Empowered by Design

UXDA's Experience Pyramid is based on three complementary approaches: Design thinking, BUP (Business, User, Product) frame and UX design tools. Design thinking provides a methodical, iterative approach to explore and serve the key user needs. To ensure overall success, it's not enough to think solely about the digital product. We have to take into account the interaction between business, users and the product, defining the possibilities and benefits of each. BUP frame allows us to do that. And, finally, UX design tools provide the best way to execute the whole process of Design thinking and the BUP approach, ensuring effective results-based financial product design.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid BUP frame

First Stage: Design Thinking

The base level of the UXDA Experience Pyramid creates a solid ground for the overall framework. Design thinking in banking is a well-known approach used by the world's leading digital technology companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. It divides the workflow into five, key action-based steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid Design thinking UXDA process

Empathize to Understand

To identify the value your product can offer customers, we must step into the users’ shoes and feel their pain as if it were our own. Discovering their feelings, needs and desires by immersing ourselves into the world of our users allows us to understand the context of the product usage.

People are surprised by the insights they gain in the empathize stage as they often differ dramatically from their initial assumptions.

Empathizing through research provides a much more thorough perspective on the problems customers actually face.

For example, by researching the users of a specific financial product, we find that most of them are family-oriented individuals. It turns out they are concerned with a number of issues related to managing the family budget, often resulting in conflicts damaging the family relationships. The main difficulties are caused by different accounts for spouses and children and the need for transaction approvals that slow down and complicate the process. It also causes a struggle for joint financial management and budget planning, making our cherished relationships even more challenging.

Define to Set Focus

At the next step, we systemize the information we have gained in the empathize stage, analyzing and prioritizing observations. Our goal is to focus on the most important aspects that create key value for the user.

For example, if we understand the importance of great family relationships for our users, we can define the main functionality of our product to suit their needs and wants. Accordingly, we would provide a possibility of joint financial management as a key priority for this specific banking product.

Ideate to Step Outside the Box

Ideation consists of seeking the best ideas for implementing key user scenarios based on the discoveries and analyses of the two previous steps. Even non-standard solutions that we may think are crazy are very welcome, as we need to step “out of the box.” The most viable solutions are selected according to the objectives of the project.

Returning to the previously mentioned example, we can create an opportunity for spouses to view both accounts in one mobile application, allowing them to freely transfer money from one account to another. At the same time, they will have the opportunity to create a separate account for family savings with limited access. All family savings and spousal activities will be completely transparent and available in the “total” section. They may also find it useful to set budget limits or warnings to remove the source of conflict and increase joint control of overspending.

Prototype to Test

Our task is to create a prototype product to put our hypotheses into practice. We need to create a simple, scaled-down version of our future service that would allow us to test the product without spending a lot of money on its development.For example, to quickly test a product hypothesis, it’s enough to draw a potential service interface on paper and include the features drawn from the empathize and define stages.

Test to Make Sure

Now, we proceed directly to the verification of the solution. We demonstrate the prototype to several potential customers by offering them a set of key scenarios and evaluating how easily they understand the principles of the product, what makes them struggle and the level of their interest. If most of the answers are positive, we can implement the needed adjustments and move to the product production. If they are not positive, we correct the hypothesis and repeat the process.

The Double Diamond Model

All the Design thinking stages can be explained through the Double Diamond model. The first diamond is known as Problem. It collects data through divergence and prioritizes key insights through convergence. The second diamond is about Solution and starts from diverging all possible solutions based on extracted insights and converging all into a prototype, which, at the end, is tested and delivered according to previously defined criteria.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid double diamond model banking

Second Stage: Business User Product (BUP) Frame

Though the user is definitely at the center of attention when it comes to user-centered thinking, there are two more crucial elements we have to take into account for a satisfactory result.

The success of a financial product depends on three equally important components: business, user and product. Spending years studying and exploring the impact of user experience methodology on financial businesses, we made sure that, in order to create a delightful experience, we had to investigate how all of them interact with one other. That's why we created the unique BUP frame.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid business user product frame

Our goal is to move away from our individual biases and put ourselves in a position to focus on the benefits of all three elements. It's not enough for us to only empathize the users after executing UX research; we also need to understand the company's business model, its mission and values and the role of the product in the company's future growth strategy.

The second level of the UXDA Experience Pyramid is closely connected to the first and third levels. We implement all five parts of the Design thinking process through a Business, User, and Product perspective. In this way, we find, define and materialize the maximum value and gains for each of these components.

Third Stage: Design Tools for UX Process

To achieve a great number of insights about the business, product and users, we need the proper tools. We have to uncover what kinds of actions we should take at each step of the Design thinking and UX process to move from idea to a useful range of data and then to a customer demanded solution. At UXDA, we achieve this by using a broad set of tested and efficient UX design tools and methods. This is the third level: the peak of the UXDA’s Experience Pyramid.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid design tools ux process

For example, the range of UX techniques we use to Empathize the User, Business and Product include:

  • Stakeholder Interview
  • User Interview
  • Ethnographic User Research
  • Competitive Audit
  • Features Audit
  • Heuristic Evaluation.

This allows us to collect the necessary data and identify the financial product challenge context from all these points of view, which are often missed.

At the next steps, we define the UX strategy using:

  • Card Sorting
  • JTBD (Jobs-To-Be-Done framework)
  • User Personas
  • Empathy Map
  • Red Route Analysis
  • Kano Model
  • User Journey Map
  • Information Architecture
  • User Flow diagram
  • Wireframes
  • UI Prototype
  • UX Testing
  • Usability Testing, etc.

We have described and demonstrated the use of the key UX tools in our previous case studies listed below.

All of these tools are used with one core purpose─to uncover the value for customers and create a digital banking product that delivers this value through the best possible experience. This results in a digital product that's easy to use, helps its users, solves their problems and creates delightful emotions.

UX connects all of these aspects (and more), improving the financial product’s success rate and reducing the risk of  failure. This approach can be used not only for new service design, but also for banking digital transformation strategy.

Not Everyone Who Has a Brush is a Painter

There's an important aspect we recommend you to consider. The techniques described in this article are the foundation for creating a great financial user experience, but these methods can deliver results only in a context of use that's provided by experienced UX architect and UI designer expertise. It's crucial to understand that a straightforward implementation of the needs identified by the user polls or researches do not always make sense for business or result in customer demand. Otherwise, instead of designing a car, Henry Ford would have started breeding faster horses.

New Age, New Rules

This article completes a series of publications revealing the essence and principles of Financial UX Methodology by UXDA. Nevertheless, the idea of our approach to creating successful digital solutions will be incomplete without the UXDA concept described below.

Financial UX Design Methodology Experience Pyramid digital marketing age

In this graph, we demonstrate two different approaches to gain business success in the recent past and in the digital present.

The Marketing Age

In the recent past, FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) products dominated the market and determined business principles, user behaviors and the mindset of successful entrepreneurs.

One of the core challenges of that time was to find ways to sell millions of goods in a world of high competition, distribution barriers and expensive promotion. To overcome this gap, marketing became the key concept to ensure success.

To make a profit in the marketing age, you had to operate in the right way, using the basis of marketing methodology: the 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place). For example, it wasn't enough to have a recipe for a tasty drink to conquer the market. You had to create attractive packaging, work on the distribution to stores, choose the right price to compete with other drinks and ensure remarkable above and below-the line promotion to generate demand.

This was a standard way to conquer market share─ consumers get a desire for the product by a “tasty” ad, and, at the local store, they notice the product in front of them once more on the first shelf, right at eye level, surrounded by POS (point of sale) advertising at a glance. They put the product in the basket and... voila! Mission complete!

The Digital Age

The digitalization of the world has completely changed the rules of the game. Digital products differ from FMCG because they have the capability to be easier and faster, adapting to the growing customer expectations and needs. Digital products also have direct distribution and don’t need mediators or expensive offline logistics. Digital products can serve customers directly from any place in the world. All you need is a good internet connection. Digital promotion is also accessible to everyone through social networks and content aggregators even in the absence of an advertising budget. Digital pricing models have become so advanced that you can make a profit without even selling a product, for example from third-party advertising or commissioning. This generates a wide range of product opportunities for customers to choose from.

Which products will the customer choose? The one that solves their problems in the easiest, quickest and most pleasant way, of course. The lack of a delightful experience often creates a gap on the product’s path to digital demand.

This way, an experience becomes the main differentiator in the digital age. It doesn’t mean that marketing is no longer needed, but, at the end of the day, it will not save your digital product from an unpleasant user experience.

Accordingly, we must use different tools to achieve that. Instead of marketing methodology and the 4Ps comes the three pyramids of the Financial UX Design methodology. Instead of perceiving customers as targets to manipulate and make a profit, we develop a brand new mindset of treating users as friends and serving their needs.

There are many who seem to adapt well to this ideology, having posters on the wall saying “we have now become a user-centered company” and using UX, CX and Design thinking as buzzwords in marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, these are often just empty words that are not based on cultural shifts or actions. In such cases, UX is used just as another marketing tool because it's trendy.

Maybe this can attract media attention, but it will not help create a demanded digital product. An experience approach doesn’t help if you are stuck in the mindset of the marketing age. Users easily detect such tricks and express their concerns through social media platforms.

Throughout the years working with multiple financial organizations, we have ensured that true success in the digital age is guaranteed only if the company is open to the new rules of the game and eager to work hard on implementing them. If you want to gain success in the digital age, you have to adapt an experience mindset, centered on user needs, feelings and behaviors.

It all starts with ourselves. Only by switching from a marketing mindset to an experience mindset can it be possible to create a business culture that's able to use the power of design to bridge the gap between failure and success.

uxda-portfolio-financial-digital-product-inspire-industry-ux-1669633193.jpg

The UXDA team wishes you good luck in creating the next generation of financial products!

Get UXDA Research-Based White Paper "How to Win the Hearts of Digital Customers":

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex
Alex, Founder/ CEO/ UX Strategist

Alex has dedicated half of his life to studying human psychology, as well as business success, developing 100+ digital projects and 30+ startups. He spent 10 years researching UX and finance to create UXDA's methodology. Alex is a passionate visionary who's capable of solving any challenge to improve the financial industry.