Fintech software has revolutionized the way that people handle their money. The keyword here is “people.” When working with a fintech business, it’s essential to remember that it’s the customer–not the technology–that matters. Whether those customers are consumers or B2B decision-makers, customers are people. From Tangible’s early days working with TurboTax to our partnership with VeraScore now, humans and their wide range of emotions are behind it all.
When dealing with people’s money, you step into realms of fear, shame, hope, and excitement. Those emotions must come into play when designing content, visuals, or storytelling for it. It requires focusing on every element to create a space that is safe, approachable, and clear–a space that people trust.
So, how do you design for the emotions that surface with fintech customer experiences? There’s no one right answer, but we’ve found that clarity, aesthetics, storytelling, and hard-won simplicity are all critical ingredients. Let’s take a closer look.
Cut the jargon.
If your audience is not comprised of directors of finance or people with accounting licenses, cut the jargon and get to the point with concrete terms. Some examples:
- AGI (or Adjusted Gross Income) translates to how much money you made after adjustments.
- Cost basis = How much you paid for something.
- Capital gain = How much you make after you sell an asset.
- Passive income = Income you make without working.
- Securities = Stocks or bonds.
- Amortization = Repaying your debt every month over a period of time.
Our team spent many years helping to build the TurboTax brand into the powerhouse that it is today. Occasionally, we would come to a key directional crossroads with the team of accountants we worked with, and in those instances, user testing always bore out that plain language wins for the consumer audience in fintech. Spending the time and effort on that testing was so important. We could never assume our users knew what we were talking about.
Don’t skip the aesthetics.
When it comes to fintech, the design has to be just as approachable as the content. For many years, there was a belief that financial brands and their subsequent experiences needed to be dull and dry to engender trust, but the old-school banking look and feel are just not relevant to the people who are using and buying so many of the fintech tools and features today. Today’s fintech images, color palettes, spacing, and typography need to be thought through, and present as sharp and simple. And they must maintain consistency, from the first touch of top-of-funnel marketing to the software’s delivery on the promise that was made.
When we designed the customer experience for VeraScore, we found increased success in getting users to complete all tasks when we simply used a leaf as the icon motif. Why a leaf? It has nothing to do with creditworthiness, but through our testing, we found that it has a calming effect on the average person. Sometimes the visual language matters more than the literal one.
Tell a story.
Stories are one of the most important tools that people have to make sense of our world. They help us to understand cause and effect–something that is critically important in the world of fintech. Just like in traditional stories, fintech design must show how a hero gets from not knowing the full financial picture of their household or small business to fully understanding.
One way to do this is through video content. With our partners at QuickBooks, we employed this approach by conceiving and producing a suite of videos and online video ads to directly promote the benefits of QuickBooks for growing businesses. In doing so, we led with stories relatable to our customers as people–showing the customer how their daily life was made better by harnessing the full potential of QuickBooks as an end-to-end mid-market solution.
Keep it simple.
It’s easy to make things complex. Making things simple is truly hard. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer and aviator, once wrote: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
As in every design project, there is a tremendous amount of thought and consideration that users don’t see. Every pixel, every color, every visual hierarchy, every form field, and every question must be considered. Each time you add just one speck of noise to the user’s comprehension you risk failure.
When we built the original tax refund prediction app for TurboTax, we knew it had to be the simplest and quickest calculator to estimate what you would get back for a refund or pay in taxes. We also knew keeping it simple would be relentless work. We spent weeks working closely with accountant advisors for TurboTax honing the questions the app needed to ask to get to an accurate prediction, along with what questions could be omitted. For example, our clients wanted to lead with the question, “Do you own a farm?” We successfully made the case that this question was not relevant to the vast majority of users, and leaving it out was worth the payoff in a streamlined workflow that would get our audience what they were looking for as quickly as possible. Per Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry, perfection was achieved.
I’ve spent the majority of my career working with fintech clients. When I ask myself what has kept me excited and fulfilled over the years, it’s that fintech, like any other space, is part of the human experience, and that means it requires human-centered design. Done well, we can bring the customer into a better space with their money, their future, and their confidence. And that’s an incredible feeling.
