Our team’s mission is to help people make better financial decisions, by designing simple, easy-to-understand financial products and services.
Choosing and using a risk-based product like an insurance policy is a pretty boggling experience for many consumers (including this one – and I am in the trade). Data on failed claims from the Association of British Insurers suggests that at least one in five of us get it wrong. Investing is often even more complicated. We interview hundreds of confused and misguided investors every year – making important decisions that they faintly understand.
To make genuinely good decisions we need to imagine and predict the needs of our future selves, to rationalise risk and weigh up probabilities. You know – all the stuff we’re terrible at. We’re much better at acting on impulses, biases and sketchy heuristics.
Yet somehow FS firms need to help us achieve good outcomes. How do you design those propositions and user journeys? How do you simplify something that’s inherently complicated?
We can reduce jargon and apply usability best practices. Both will help. But there’s a basic level of complexity here that’s harder to reckon with. Can we nudge people towards prudent financial behaviours? Maybe we should make the mundane engaging – but when and how?
It’s hard but it’s not impossible. Here are some things we’ve been doing recently:
- An investment platform needed a new journey for clients drawing down on their pension – a challenging, irreversible, unfamiliar process that even seasoned investors struggle with. After identifying the barriers and hurdles, we designed comprehension checks to slow people down and prompts that make them think. (Don’t tell Steve Krug.) The result? People are nearly twice as likely to make long-term decisions when using the new journey.
- A large banking services provider wanted to create a digital debt collection service that helps people in vulnerable situations to plot a manageable path out of debt. We showed how debtors’ past experiences shaped their expectations of new ones, how important it was to earn their trust, and how easily it could be lost. We designed a solution that helped people struggling with debt feel more in control of their situation and make informed decisions about the options available to them.
- We designed a journey that helps people find the right kind of car finance product for them (rather than just picking the cheapest, guessing what the acronyms mean, then hoping for the best). Instead of simply asking ‘Do you need this feature?’, it asks questions that provoke people to reflect on their situation and consider their needs more deeply. We know that it works because users said things like “No matter how much you know, it’s simplifying the decision-making process”.
You need to dig deep to solve knotty, people problems like these. You need to think differently, to summon a bit of courage to challenge orthodox thinking, and tenacity to see things through. But we trust the UCD method because it works and reliably delivers a payoff – both for the firms we work for and for us as researchers and designers.
These problems are both knotty and important. So you get a sense of growth and satisfaction from knowing that you’re making things better.
