Yes, Designing FinTech Applications Is Quite Challenging!

Designers must think of UX as a challenge, not an obstacle. The following four tips will help designers craft a compelling UX for FinTech apps.

It is true that most user experience (UX) designers don’t find it exciting to study federal banking regulations or account for the complex bureaucracy that is crucial for FinTech application success. When you take a group of creative personnel and force them to learn the minutiae of industry regulations, you can see their eyes glaze over.

In addition to being unglamorous for designers, FinTech is also very challenging to design for. The requirement documents are often meticulously written and are riddled with industry jargon. Hence, UX designers should find a precarious balance between app usability and productivity.

Despite being of lesser interest for the designers, UX is one of the most crucial elements for a FinTech app. Designers must think of it as a challenge, not an obstacle. The following four tips will help designers craft a compelling UX for FinTech apps.

Factor in the Future

In developing technology solutions for any industry, it is always a good practice to factor in the future. While designing for FinTech, keeping the future in perspective is imperative, primarily because the industry is in a constant state of transformation.

We’re right in the middle of a digital revolution in the banking and finance industry. Almost every vertical in the industry is attempting to catch up to one another. Financial institutions, credit unions, and banks experience agile, sometimes even volatile digital transformation, as the financial technologies are redefining their relationships with each other.

Unsurprisingly, all of this relates to your designing. At a high-level, it means that you are supposed to leave ample space for future changes. A recent example occurred when many FinTech companies faced difficulties when the US government restructured the NAFTA deal. The government placed new tariffs on specific items that are shipped between the USA and Canada. And, due to this, FinTech companies needed new logic in place and even had to change the design to display the added cost to the buyer clearly.

Leverage the Power of Ease

Let’s begin this tip with an example. Many users complain about Acorns’s savvier design. Acorns is a popular Robo-investor FinTech app, having more than a hundred thousand downloads on the Google Play Store. To understand their app design, the users have to be industry-savvy, which makes the user experience complex for most of the users.

Although the seamless user experience is the fundamental rule of any mobile app design, user friction also has its importance, especially when it is easy for the users to make mistakes with their money. Some apps like Venmo (a payment app), make users go through extra steps while sending money so that users can confirm their action.

Roadblocks like these help FinTechs curb silly user mistakes and eliminate catastrophic errors. It only momentarily hinders the users, and their overall experience won’t be hampered due to this. Even the users will be thankful to you for making things a bit harder to keep their money safe.

Responsiveness

Another principle of app usability is providing users with responsiveness at every step of the user journey. For FinTech apps, it is not just good to have; it is imperative.

Users that don’t come from digital-savvy generations will avoid trusting an app that requires partial or complete control over their finances.

Be it banking, budgeting, investing, or any other type of FinTech platform, it is crucial for FinTech service providers to reassure users and validate that their money, as well as their financial information, is in safe hands. But, the requirements do not stop at the safety, the availability of funds is also a crucial element. Hence, your FinTech app design needs to be responsive to user requests.

Face the FinTech and Learn

For some, designing digital experiences for the banking and finance industry can be frustrating in the beginning. Believe me, it isn’t always exciting, but it creates a sense of opportunity for designers to tackle real-world and relevant user experience problems.

When I asked my in-house designers at Nimble AppGenie (Mobile Wallet Development Company) about the project which made them learn the most about their job, almost all of them pointed towards the banking portal we built for a bank in the African region. The project features almost everything that we’ve talked about in this article.

Despite having created FinTech applications for more than seven years, our designer faced new challenges a few times when dealing with the highly technical workflow and complicated logic. Is it because the user expectation and design trends change every year? This was definitely a significant factor, and it is one that makes UX so interesting!

In our experience, every new FinTech project will bring valuable new learnings to your design team.

Motivation apart, having experience in FinTech projects such as banking or e-wallet app development, allows your team to create compelling user experiences. Conclusively, all I would say is that creating user experiences for FinTech applications will require both graphics and FinTech industry expertise, combined with a learning mindset.

This blog was originally posted on: https://dzone.com/articles/yes-designing-fintech-applications-is-quite-challe