What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 1. What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon

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1 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 1 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon

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3 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 3 One of my favorite selling points is that I come from both inside and outside the financial services industry. In fact, when I was brought in to redesign a site for one of the world s largest, most recognizable banks a few years ago, I had only minimal financial services exposure. They brought us in just for that reason - to give a fresh perspective and view on a relatively legacy industry. I had worked for the top brands in technology, hospitality, pharma, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, ecommerce and more. I used the same proven process successfully with them, so I was 100% confident I could easily apply it in this case. Being in an industry now like financial services, it's even more important to innovate because the industry is changing so quickly. To me it s simple, understand your user s needs, innovate around them, and solve them with technology and good user experience. In an environment where financial services firms are faced with relentless regulatory pressures, many forget the other Know Your Customer (KYC) conversation UX Design. Demonstrating the critical importance of design and customer experience to business operations, Forrester suggests taking four main design principles and extending them to create what it calls the customer-obsessed operating model which would [1] put customers at the center of their universe, [2] use insights to anticipate and delight them, [3] move fast to outpace competitors and disruptors, and [4] connect functions to deliver seamless and differentiated customer experience. I couldn t agree more. You don t need to be obsessive about design and notice fingerprints on a windows to successfully implement a user-focused design strategy. Leave that to the designers. But what CIOs, Heads of UX, Digital, Technology and Operations should be thinking about is whether they are solving a user problem and advocating for the strategy, content, workflow, aesthetic and experience customers really want. As an advocate for user experience, I would argue financial services firms can actually learn a lot about the right approach to UX Design from.. Bacon.

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5 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 5 How UX Design Can Bring Help Bring Home the Bacon Three years ago Oscar Mayer had a problem. Everyone knew their hot dog, but no one knew about Oscar Mayer Bacon. When they talked to their customers in focus groups, they were excited to learn that men were actually pretty obsessed with Bacon. And they played off of that knowledge and designed the Say it with Bacon Campaign centered around 3 gift boxed Bacon products (a Bacon money clip, cufflinks and multitool, promoted over Twitter with a limited 20 item daily run that always sold out and a video and ad campaign focused on the idea that you give a woman a diamond as a gift and a man, in a carriage, a box of Bacon. The campaign was a resounding success. It won an Effie award for effectiveness and a Shorty award in the Food and Beverage category because it understood that first and foremost UX design must define the strategy and execution around the user and continuously iterate on the concept based on continuous user feedback and data. According to Nielson, When all was said and done, the effort had garnered 500 million impressions (70% of which were earned) and Oscar Mayer saw a 53% lift in branded Bacon conversations. More importantly, it helped move product: while sales across the entire category slipped -7.7% due to rising commodity costs, Oscar Mayer s Bacon sales were up a hearty 3.3%. It doesn t matter if you re selling Bacon or planning your financial future, financial institutions can learn a lot about connecting with users and understanding needs and pain points from this example they just need to apply it to their unique business context.

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7 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 7 Strategy and Content: Give the Users What They Want Wireframing and Prototyping: Design, Tech or Both? The first mistake many companies make is that they assume they know what their customers want and base their design strategy on the assumption. You would be surprised how many times I started a project with a big bank or Fortune 500 company to discuss a customer-facing application, and they have never spoken with the customer. A few years ago, I was working on a project for a brand name, global credit card company that understood their customers in Mexico and China were deeply mistrustful of the local banking system and they had an opportunity to deliver them a customer obsessed experience via a reloadable travel card that allowed them to move cash more safely within the local economy. It is this insight that allowed them to design a highly competitive and unique value proposition to their clients that would never have occurred to them in another location like London. The lesson: don t assume you know what your customer wants. Research competitors and talk directly to your customers before you set the strategy. While UX is a creative function, it must also work hand-inhand with technology, operations and analytics to prototype and test wireframes, user flows, data that informs usability of the application. Users can tell when experiences aren t thought through, and they will leave. This goes back to creating a design and development process that is iterative enough to allow for ongoing heuristic evaluations. Simply put, financial services firms need to build in user feedback touchpoints where they can rate the system based on these criteria, and if certain areas fail, that is where changes need to be made. This data can also be collected organically by looking at user behavior statistics with the website or application to understand how they re engaging with the content, workflow, etc. and thinking through how to enhance, streamline, speed and continually create better experiences based on that data. Take a recent real estate analytics project where I was asked to create an analyst portal real estate companies could use to benchmark portfolios. While understanding the business strategy and workflows is critically important to developing a simpler, easier and more intuitive user experience, it is just as important to understand what content in the portal the user finds most valuable. This nugget of truth can then inform what is highlighted in the navigation structure, flow, click criteria, filters and so on and whether it is a Quick View visualization of Building Data (Hotel vs Residential vs Commercial) users need access to the most quickly or something else. Forget about the one-time video you want to promote to them or product you want front and center, what does the user want? What information do they need when the client is calling and yelling at them that is the value add.

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9 What Financial Services Firms Can Learn about UX from. Bacon 9 Data, Analytics and More Data: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate Taking Action While data is important to inform the strategy and wireframes, ongoing analytics and iteration is what can give businesses the real edge. A Forrester report from this past year reinforces, Journey analytics helps companies combine quantitative and qualitative data to optimize customer interactions and predict future behaviors. The report suggests that the approach to customer experience (CX) and customer insights (CI) should use analytics to uncover multi-touchpoint behavior. This is an incredibly important point, and when applied to design, means ongoing analytics across all customer touchpoints and feeding that data back into the ongoing design updates. Whether it s a website, mobile application, portal or other, a firm s product structure and strategy needs to connect back to what the customer wants, and that can be exceedingly different from market to market and customer to customer. Financial services firms have a clear model to follow, they simply need to embrace placing the customer at the center of the strategy, and after that, the proof is in the. Bacon. For financial services firms that are taking a content-lead strategy, for example an exchange that wants to use its website as a differentiator and content delivery mechanism for CFOs who may list in the future, the company needs to get in the mind of the CFO. What content would the CFO find most valuable, and as you post that content, are you analyzing your user data to understand which content is being viewed the most to inform your future content strategy and which pieces receive top billing on your dashboard. Do you understand the job title of who is engaging with the content and if it s the CMO instead of the CFO, what the CFOs looking at instead? A consistent stream of data analytics must power the iterative UX design.

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