There has been a large shift to online banking (due to the pandemic), as well as recent political and economic issues at the global scale. In fact, two-third of adults in the world now make or receive a digital payment. According to the World Bank Group President David Malpass:
The digital revolution has catalyzed increases in the access and use of financial services across the world, transforming ways in which people make and receive payments, borrow, and save.
This clearly shows a shift from a traditional brick-and-mortar banking system to a digital one. However, online banking services often fall short. They provide a clunky interface that is difficult to navigate and often invokes frustration. In fact, a study by Forrester in 2020 revealed that about 58% of metropolitan adults in India might switch banks due to a poor digital experience.
One of the reasons this happens is due to bad banking app UX, which itself is due to a lack of understanding of user needs.
How Can You Create a Better User Experience (UX) For Your Customers?
Building trust with customers through intuitive design and a seamless banking app UX can elevate your bank’s position and create loyal, trusting customers. By providing a good user experience to your customers online, you can establish yourselves as a secure, reliable brand that your customers will want to bank with.
Here’s what you need to consider to provide a good banking experience for your customers:
Personalization
One of the most unique features of banking services is that it does not have a set demographic. People across social and economic classes can use the same banks for their needs. With such a large customer base, it is important that banks move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to providing a tailored experience to each customer.
How user research helps here: By conducting user research across different demographic segments, you can get a sense of the features they are looking for, their specific pain points in navigating your services, and how you can solve those by offering a seamless banking app UX.
Aesthetics & Simplicity
With so many services offered by banks, the user interface often gets cluttered quite easily.
For example, consider the Canara Bank website.
- The website looks cluttered while still having a lot of blank space.
- The navigation is confusing – when you try to scroll down, you find that only the banner on the carousel moves, not the page itself. It takes a while to figure out the best place to position your mouse to scroll down.
Bad website design (such as the one above), combined with product pages with too much information, can lead to users getting confused, dropping off, and having an overwhelming user experience overall.
How user research helps here: Through various usability testing methods, you can identify the most optimal user journey for your users. Similarly, you can test any new or repurposed content with your users to see how well they react to it and how attentive they are while viewing it.
Security
Users want their information and money to stay safe when they sign up with a bank, and many banks enable multiple layers of security and authentication to enable this. However, slow log-in processes, failed authentication attempts and having too many steps can also turn customers away, especially when are looking for a faster banking experience.
How user research helps here: With user research, you can test multiple authentication and security journeys with users to identify frustrations and understand their thoughts on how it can be made simpler.
Mobile-First Design
The number of smartphone users across the world is estimated to reach around 6.648 Billion by the end of 2022. This has mostly been possible thanks to a combination of factors: cheaper smartphone prices, lower internet costs, and the overall development of telecom infrastructure even in the most rural parts of the country. This means that while most people would previously visit physical bank branches for their needs, a large portion of them will now switch to banking apps for their day-to-day transactions. However, banking websites and applications are not very mobile-friendly – they are not optimized for a smaller screen, and often use too much data and load slowly.
How user research can help: A lot of banks don’t optimize their website for their banking app UX, instead using the same design and wireframe. This doesn’t work because mobile navigation has different pain points than website navigation. With user research, you can understand what these pain points are to optimize them for your app for a faster, smoother experience.
User Research Can Provide Direction to Banking Apps
From the testing and development stage to the redesigning stage, conducting user research across critical stages can help banks develop a holistic banking app UX to serve all their customers’ needs. While you can conduct user research through an agency, it is also possible to do it in-house. In fact, doing it in-house can give you an edge – given that you probably know more about your bank and the banking sector in general, compared to a third-party agency.
Key Takeaways
Affect UX is a DIY user research platform that can provide unbiased insights into what your users need in their banking experience. Through our patented Facial Coding, Voice AI and Eye Tracking technology, you can get granular insights into your users’ needs, preferences, and dislikes. This can help you create a cutting-edge banking app UX that can work for all your users seamlessly.
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