Overcoming the User Experience (UX) challenge: is a build or buy approach better?

Transcription

1 Overcoming the User Experience (UX) challenge: is a build or buy approach better? Today s consumers expect rich, consistent user experiences across all touch-points. The continual emergence of new channels and device types, together with the ability to deliver them is becoming a more complex challenge for financial institutions. Those banks which offer excellence in user experience are differentiating themselves from the rest of the market. This paper highlights the key issues that a financial institution should consider when evaluating the options available a bespoke build, extending a 3rd party framework or adopting a UXP. It explores the pros and cons of each approach to help financial institutions select the best fit, not only for their current business needs but also to enable new opportunities and requirements to be embraced in the future. Temenos White Paper

2 2 Introduction Consumer adoption of mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Worldwide sales of smart connected devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) will exceed 1.7 billion in 2014 with shipments of tablets and smartphones exceeding the growth of desktop and laptop PCs by huge margins, according to global research firm, IDC. It is predicted that 2013 could see mobile devices hit a billion units shipped for the first time ever. 1 With a huge surge in demand for tablets and smartphones shown in emerging countries, aided by the less prohibitive prices in comparison to PCs and laptops, it seems that whatever country or continent you are in, people are more likely to have a mobile device than not. This, in turn, is changing consumer behaviour and the ways in which consumers expect to interact with financial services providers, especially as they become accustomed to the rich online experience offered by many general retailers. Financial institutions are, therefore, under increasing pressure to keep up with developments surrounding online and mobile technologies to meet customer demands. To further add to the complexity, financial applications need to be very secure and, due to the high volumes of transactional data and potential number of concurrent users, they need to be scalable across a global enterprise without comprising performance. Basic HTML forms with browser security no longer suffice, especially when the applications are expected to manage sensitive data or monetary transactions. At the same time, these applications need to be able to run on different browsers and platforms, and support not only broad bandwidth access but also narrow bandwidth, which still prevails in some developing countries. Together, all of these issues present a real challenge for financial institutions looking to remain competitive in this fast moving world. These institutions need to maximise the true potential of online and mobile technologies, and be able to embrace new channels and devices as they emerge to attract new customers, improve customer loyalty and deliver competitive advantage. Indeed, customers expect to be able to interact with their banks via the channel and device of their choosing, whether they are at home browsing the internet on a tablet or on the go using a smartphone device. As well as interacting with financial services providers, customers also expect a positive customer experience and one that is consistent across all touch points. Also, banks are increasingly conscious that an excellent UX is a powerful differentiator in the face of dwindling customer loyalty, driven by increased pricing transparency and facilitated switching, and of growing competition from non-banks (e.g. payments by Amazon, retail banking with Tesco). These concurrent dynamics are forcing financial institutions to pay more attention to the user experience (UX) they are delivering across all of their different channels and to all of their user types. However, the complexities associated with delivering business applications that provide rich, consistent user experiences across a range of channels have increased enormously, and, with new channels and device types continually emerging, it is getting more complicated by the day. Financial institutions typically require business applications to support multiple products and brands that need to be accessible to a range of users, such as direct consumers, internal staff and intermediaries. The applications also need to be accessible via a multitude of channels, including online, mobile, call centre and branch. This is a complex business model which is further complicated by the huge range of technology platforms that the business applications need to be accessible on and optimised for, ranging from desktop PCs to tablet devices and smartphones. It is not unusual for a single financial services product, such as home insurance or an investment product to have to be developed and presented in at least a dozen different ways depending on the channel, user and device. This can be a major (and very costly) obstacle when getting products to market. A way in which companies can attempt to address these challenges is to look at implementing a UX solution that will provide a consistent, high quality user experience across all channels and devices. This can be done by developing their own UX solution in-house or extending a 3 rd party framework to build their business applications. However, an alternative and more beneficial approach is to adopt a user experience platform (UXP). Sources 1 IDC s Worldwide Smart Connected Device Tracker Forecast Data, February 28, 2013

3 3 What is a UXP? Choosing an approach The Gartner IT Glossary defines a UXP as an integrated set of technologies used to provide interaction between a user and a set of applications, processes, content, services or other users. A UXP has several components, including portals, mashup tools, content management, search, rich internet application (RIA) tools, analytics, collaboration, social and mobile tools. It may be delivered as a suite of products or as a single product. 2 Many organisations may well have existing components that address, say, content management or collaboration. However, they may have a requirement for the development of web applications. A UXP will provide a framework to enable full integration to existing solutions and, in some cases, provide the missing additional components such as the ability to develop web-enabled applications. A UXP should ultimately provide best of breed fully integrated solutions that all share a common framework and a single presentation platform. Before making the decision to start a bespoke build, extend a 3 rd party framework or adopt a UXP, companies need to carefully consider the pros and cons of each approach and decide what will best fit their current and future business requirements. Managing technical requirements Every web application developed has to provide not only business functionality but also meet specific technical requirements. These include: Security Performance Scalability Resilience Network efficiency (bandwidth optimisation) Memory efficiency Cross-browser support A large part of designing and developing web applications using proprietary development is the management of all of these complex technical requirements. In fact, this can take up as much as 40 per cent of the overall development effort. Making sure each web application can run on multiple platforms and devices can then create a huge amount of duplicated effort. Astute organisations will try to minimise this effort by using 3 rd party frameworks or developing their own. However, the latter approach can be very expensive. It requires significant resources to manage everything from initial development through to ongoing support, maintenance and future roadmap enhancements. Today, with modern web technologies evolving at a faster rate than any other technology area, it is becoming increasingly difficult to handle all the frameworks/libraries required to build a bespoke UXP. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that many frameworks are set to become outdated within just a couple of years, if not before. A company is likely to find that adopting a proven UXP will be a far more advantageous approach when considering the complexity of the technical requirements that have to be considered. A UXP with a runtime environment will provide a standard and consistent infrastructure that will manage all of the technical requirements typically associated with enterprise web applications, which are then automatically applied and updated to every business application running on the platform. This approach can drastically reduce development and testing time, thereby enabling significant cost savings, acceleration of speed to market as well as providing a future proof platform. Resource Any company needs to consider the amount of resource (time, money and skills) that it is willing to put into the upfront project as well as future maintenance. If it decides to custom build applications inhouse, it needs to think about what support is required for the full lifecycle of creating, deploying and managing them. What skills are required and what specific features need to be taken into account? Sources 2 Gartner IT Glossary

4 4 Another consideration is how flexible the framework is. Will it support ongoing business requirements and be adaptable to change? For example, new browser releases will need to be supported, but backwards compatibility will also need to be provided for older browsers. New channels and devices will continue to emerge and ongoing security issues will need to be monitored and corrected. The list goes on. By adopting a 3 rd party UXP, company resources can focus on the business functionality needs rather than the underlying platform. The ongoing maintenance and development of the UXP, to address evolving requirements and embrace new technologies, is fully supported by the vendor and its UXP roadmap, enabling in-house resources to focus on the core business requirements. Productisation One of the key differences between proprietary code versus a product approach is the research and development involved. A proprietary development approach normally focuses on meeting known, basic requirements, which tends to mean that flexibility and long-term agility usually have to be sacrificed in return for keeping development costs down. There is also the issue of speed to market. For an organisation looking to develop its own UX solution, it could be years before it is actually complete and ready to be implemented. By this time, the requirements will no doubt have evolved along with the emergence of further innovative web technologies. Meanwhile, if companies choose to invest in a UXP that is already available on the market, chances are that it is supported by many years of research and development (R&D), has been developed according to industry specifications and standards, and is supported by a cutting-edge product roadmap. Future proofing user interfaces User interface (UI) technology has evolved significantly in the last few years and is only set to continue changing. Already the next generation of UI technology is upon us. Modern web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 are coming to the fore, competing with proprietary alternatives like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex and others. Companies will need to stay abreast of these developments and decide what their strategy is going to be: will they choose a proprietary approach or will they migrate to newer open standards? Furthermore, in the long term, standards will evolve, and interaction designers and usability experts will combine to design compelling new applications that are multi-interactive, choosing the most appropriate interaction method for each action and sometimes supporting multiple types of interaction methods for a single action, such as responding to a voice command or a gesture. This will pose further challenges to companies supporting their own web applications and, therefore, a 3 rd party UXP underpinned by a future-proof product roadmap and specialist UI expertise, will prove to be a far less risky approach. Here are some of the key considerations for companies looking to use frameworks to develop a bespoke UXP: Core framework: a multitude of open source frameworks exist for creating web applications. Traditional Java frameworks like Spring and Struts are already being superseded by JavaScript alternatives like Ember, BackBone and Angular, to name just a few. Their ability to support issues such as cross browser, security, scalability and performance is limited and varies greatly between frameworks. And there s nothing to say that any of these frameworks won t become outdated in just a few years. Security: there are many risks associated with adopting open source frameworks. To start with, while companies plan for the cost of maintaining and upgrading these frameworks, many leave themselves open to significant security breaches. CSS compatibility: much of the rich, desirable and innovative user interface functionality is achieved using newer CSS3 features, most of which are not supported in Internet Explorer until version 9 and above. This means that a library such as CSS3PIE is needed to achieve Internet Explorer compatibility. HTML5: a library like Modernizer is needed to detect for HTML5 capabilities. Other libraries may also be added to provide backwards compatibility for HTML5 features (known as polyfills). Device detection: the number of mobile devices being used today is growing at an unprecedented rate. It s essential to have device detection functionality to ensure an optimised user experience. Devices can be detected using JavaScript or solutions like WURFL. Widgets: there are a host of widget libraries available and different libraries have been developed for different devices. It is likely that multiple widget libraries will be required to meet all functionality requirements. Layout: the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that a web application needs to work with is growing constantly. Responsive web design allows an application to work seamlessly across thousands of different screens. This requires a library such as Bootstrap. Portal: for portal applications, a library is required to manage the JSR286 Portlet specification. These are just some of issues that need to be considered when adopting a bespoke approach. Even if a company succeeds in integrating all the separate libraries and frameworks, the work doesn t just stop there. It then has to develop a roadmap to manage upgrades, and ongoing compatibility with individual frameworks and libraries many of which will keep changing. In addition, these frameworks are not necessarily optimised to manage specific business needs, such as supporting different channels, brands, users, devices and languages. Significant development work is usually required to bring presentation and process together, and this tends to result in effort duplication for each individual application and increases the long-term maintenance burden.

5 5 Conclusion A trusted software provider Financial institutions are now recognising that, as a result of changing consumer behaviour driven by device technology adoption worldwide, the User Experience can be a key differentiator. How to deliver optimum user experiences across all customer touchpoints has subsequently become a top strategic objective for many financial institutions. This has raised the question for many organisations of whether to perpetuate a bespoke approach or adopt a UXP that is currently available on the market. Typically, many discussions around User Experience focus on functionality, usability and personalisation and, as much as these are all crucial to the quality of experience that consumers demand, it is the underlying technology platform that is absolutely fundamental to providing optimum user experiences which are secure, scalable and agile whatever the user, channel, device or language. The underpinning technology platform, be it a bespoke build or a 3 rd party UXP, is the absolute key to success in delivering a quality user experience. It is essential that companies fully understand all of the complexities that need to be considered before deciding on the approach they undertake. As Gartner highlights in its 2011 report The Emerging User Experience Platform: Users have complained for years about the multitude of technologies and tools that they must use to deliver the variety of UXs necessary. The demand for the UXP comes from users who are frustrated by the effort it takes to take technologies from different vendors, or perhaps from the same vendor, and integrate them for a complete UX solution. Most of this technology is not adequately integrated, requiring internal resources or external service engagements to facilitate the integration. This can require a significant amount of time and money, leading to delays and cost overruns. 3 In 2012, Temenos acquired UXP specialist edge IPK and its flagship UXP product edgeconnect a fifth-generation platform that has benefited from over 12 years of investment and 30 man-years of focused development. Committed to the ongoing development of edgeconnect as a standalone, sector-generic UXP, Temenos has increased its R&D investment in the product and accelerated its roadmap, introducing new UI developments and implementing new technologies as and when they become available. Currently, Temenos roadmap is focused on supporting standards for modern web technologies, as this is not only key to supporting desktop browsers, but also ensuring compatibility with all devices in the future. edgeconnect is already used in over 30 countries and supports a number of mission-critical business processes for large financial institutions such as Allianz, Deutsche Bank, Intact Insurance, Liverpool Victoria, Metro Bank, Willis and Zurich Financial Services. Author Dharmesh Mistry is UXP and Mobile Product Director at Temenos, based in London and can be contacted at dmistry@temenos.com When developing a single browser-based front end it may be hard to justify the upfront investment required for a complete UXP. However, the long-term cost implications of proprietary development can end up being far greater. From a business perspective, a UXP provides the greatest benefits by: Providing a rich, optimised user experience across all customer touch points, whatever the channel or device Accelerating time to market for products and services Significantly reducing cost in development, on-going maintenance and support Enhancing the user experience and creating a feedback loop through analytics, thereby improving customer retention Providing business agility to respond quickly to increasing customer demands and expectations Enabling economies of scale, in terms of investment and resources, by maintaining a single platform to deliver user experiences across multiple touch points Providing a future proof platform that can embrace new technologies and devices as they emerge The UXP becoming the key differentiator, thereby providing a clear competitive advantage in the eyes of customers Sources 3 Gartner Research: The Emerging User Experience Platform, - Published 29th March 2011 by Analyst Gene Phifer

6 About Temenos Founded in 1993 and listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX: TEMN), Temenos Group AG is the market leading provider of banking software systems to retail, corporate, universal, private, Islamic, microfinance and community banks, wealth managers, and financial institutions. Headquartered in Geneva with 59 offices worldwide, Temenos software is proven in over 1,500 customer deployments in more than 140 countries across the world. Temenos products provide advanced technology and rich functionality, incorporating best practice processes that leverage Temenos expertise around the globe. Temenos customers are proven to be more profitable than their peers: in the period , Temenos customers enjoyed on average a 30% higher return on assets, a 46% higher return on capital and an 8.5 percentage point lower cost/income ratio than banks running legacy applications. TEMENOS, TEMENOS, TEMENOS T24 and are registered trademarks of Temenos Headquarters SA 2013 Temenos Headquarters SA - all rights reserved. Warning: This document is protected by copyright law and international treaties. Unauthorised reproduction of this document, or any portion of it, may result in severe and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under law