How Can Banks Create a User Experience First Culture When Building Mobile Apps?

The digital age has led to significant advancements in the software and mobile app industry and has set a new standard for what consumers expect during their interactions with technology, particularly with banking. One of these expectations is an optimal user experience. 90% of users are reported to have exited an app due to a poor user experience, and with higher competition in the mobile application development industry, banks cannot afford to have an inadequate user experience, particularly with the critical functionalities that take place in banking apps including payments, investments, and accessing sensitive data.

The user experience refers to how a user navigates and traverses an application to achieve a particular goal, and their perception of the application from its usage. Their perception can be gauged by the application's ease of use, efficiency, and other deciding factors. A good user experience will enhance the usability of an application and from a business perspective increase customer loyalty and trust.

Optimizing for user experience goes beyond adding small features, but involves a fundamental shift in how banks develop their mobile applications. The goals, preferences, challenges, and needs of the user will need to be incorporated into every stage of the design and development process. This article outlines how banks can adopt this shift in mindset, and facilitate a user experience-first culture when developing modern mobile apps.

Adopting a User-Centric Design Philosophy

As previously mentioned, adopting a user experience-first culture requires a mindset and philosophical shift in how you build apps. This means adopting new frameworks and approaches that prioritize the end user's experience at every stage. Core elements that need to be incorporated for a user-centered design include the following:

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Visibility: from the moment that users open the banking application, they should have an understanding of what the app is about and how to use it. For banking applications in particular, users having a misconstrued understanding can not only lead them away but can lead them to make mistakes in aspects such as payments and transactions, which can lead to lost funds and reputational damage.

Accessibility: this involves making sure that mobile applications built are accessible to all users. Once this has been established users should be able to find information quickly. With the current attention span only being 8 seconds, banks would need to consider the likelihood of users exiting the app if the correct information is hard to find. This is why banks need to make sure that elements of an app such as buttons, navigation menus, and search options can be found easily. These intermediaries will then help users find the main banking information easier to find.

Legibility: this involves making the text easy for users to read. A big part of navigating an app involves reading information and instructions so having the correct text fonts, positioning, and contrasting will enhance the overall user experience.

Language: although banking apps may need to incorporate financial jargon and terminologies to present information such as account terms, transaction, payment, and investment jargon, a balance needs to be created between incorporating this and making sure that the overall language is easy to understand.

Adopting a user-centric design mindset changes how banks develop mobile applications from the ground up, enabling future application developments to be more effective, as the necessary frameworks are in place which will help save time and research efforts.

UX Research

A fundamental part of adopting a user experience first approach to your applications is to understand your target users and make sure the features being built are right for them. Banking apps can cater to a variety of target users from individuals such as young students or high net-worth individuals, to entities including SMEs and large corporations. This means it’s important to conduct the necessary research on who the application is being built for to create an optimal user experience. This is where UX research helps to identify the best ways to build apps that satisfy users whilst achieving business goals. How banks can conduct the necessary research includes the following:

Understanding the target users' needs, behaviours, and challenges through various quantitative methods such as ethnographic studies which involve analysing how users naturally interact with the app in their everyday lives, and one-to-one interviews. Quantitative methods such as A/B testing, can provide the necessary information for a larger sample size.

Using the information gained from the research to create detailed representations (personas) of each set of target users which will include their demographics, goals, challenges, and individual use cases. These personas will then guide the design and development processes and will be a key point of reference throughout to ensure that the app remains user-focused.

Using the personas made to conduct user journey mapping. This is a complete visual representation of how they interact with the application, outlining all the steps they take to achieve a particular goal whether that be checking an account balance or transferring funds. Key interactions, pain points, and frustrations will be documented at each stage to help identify opportunities to improve our design for an optimal user experience.

‍With 88% of product teams attributing user experience (UX) research to effective decision-making and improved business outcomes, the importance of understanding the user through the appropriate research methods is key in guiding design decisions and facilitating user-friendly apps.

Adopting Agile Development Methodologies

A popular software development methodology, with a 58% usage within financial services, Agile is an iterative approach to software development where projects are broken down into smaller, manageable pieces. This provides an environment where companies can constantly adapt and improve their solution in response to changing market and customer demands. Adopting this approach helps create a constant feedback loop with users that allows for improvements to be made that prioritize user experience. Banks can incorporate Agile Development methodologies into their projects through the following:

Choosing an Agile framework that best suits the team size, needs, project requirements, complexity, and general organizational culture. Common frameworks include Scrum which involves short time-boxed iterations and sprints where different features and bug fixes are merged within this time, or Kanban which emphasizes continuous task completion without specific deadlines and visualisation of workflows.

Forming cross-functional teams: this refers to a team of professionals with various backgrounds from developers, designers, product managers, testers, and more. This enhances the user experience of solutions built as their needs will be tackled from multiple perspectives, e.g. the designer prioritizing an intuitive UI, developers prioritizing a high-performing and secure backend, and the product managers prioritizing user needs and prioritizing features based on their findings.

Receiving regular feedback from users: one of the unique features of Agile development is the ability to release deliverables regularly through sprints. Users would be able to give their feedback on a feature post-release, which can then be used to make the necessary changes to not only improve user experience but do so in a timely fashion that may not be feasible with another methodology like Waterfall.

With 93% of agile organizations reporting better customer satisfaction than non-agile teams, adopting the agile methodology that places customer feedback at the core of its processes, from pre-development in sprint planning to post-development feedback, will no doubt facilitate a user experience that increases customer retention and loyalty.

Summary - Will UX shape the future of how banks build their mobile apps?

Moving forward, with more users adopting mobile banking, and more banking solutions emerging, creating a cultural shift within your organization that puts user experiences at the heart of development projects will allow you to compete in the current digital banking landscape.

Technologies such as AI and machine learning algorithms will be able to anticipate customers' needs, as well as provide personalized and efficient customer service for mobile banking customers through AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants. Combining the use of these technologies with the correct methodologies and practices will enable banks to foster a user-first culture that develops solutions that allow users to have a smooth and effective banking experience.

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