How AI is Revolutionizing UX/UI Design Services in Fintech
With so much going on in the world of artificial intelligence over the past few years, we wanted to dig a little deeper into how AI tools are changing the way the industry is approaching fintech application design in this new age of AI.
Who better to get the lowdown from than our Head of UX/UI Design, Nikolay Slezkinsky? In the following article, Nikolay shares how AI tools are opening up a world of new possibilities in fintech design, leading to more mindful and well-researched design choices, assistance in the pursuit of increased personalization, and an evolution in the traditional role of the designer.
How fintech UX/UI design services differ
Designing user interfaces and refining user experience (UX) for financial applications can, in certain cases, be challenging when compared to other categories. Fintech UIs could be regarded as a special case because they require the synthesis of many more variables in order for a project to be considered a success.
Firstly, there’s more at stake in financial applications, both literally and figuratively. Unlike social media, communication, or gaming applications, users manage their wealth via these apps, often by accessing instruments that have steep learning curves, and in which there’s a possibility of loss.
For these reasons, fintech UX/UI design is not just concerned with imbuing users with good feelings, being intuitive to navigate, and exhibiting a certain degree of “stickiness.”
UX/UI design services for fintech applications require that designers, in collaboration with product owners, bear the added burden of having to simplify the complexity of financial services, which can often be quite intimidating. The onus is on them to make the interaction with complicated financial instruments easier for new users, while also providing advanced users with the deeper features they require.
There’s also the added issue of trust to keep in mind. Whenever money is on the line a higher level of trust has to be instilled, which relates both to how these services are presented, but also how the experience of using these interfaces feels to the end user.
Today, as artificial intelligence finds its way into all industries, UX/UI designers have access to powerful tools that can provide them with a variety of data-driven insights to help inform their choices.
What good UX/UI design achieves in fintech
Good UX/UI design for fintech lets users know that they’re dealing with a professional enterprise. It builds trust, while also inspiring confidence to learn more and to explore what the application in question can offer.
Applications such as trading platforms can be enormously complex, and good design ensures that users are not discouraged by this complexity. The platform should allow users to engage with the areas they’re interested in and understand at present, offer opportunities for learning, and allow more complicated features to be accessed over time. It should be able to achieve this without alienating advanced users by coming across as overly simplistic.
A tool only becomes useful when you know what it’s for, so the best trading platforms manage the delicate balance between simplicity and power, not overwhelming the user, but having everything they need (and will need) close at hand. AI helps designers determine where things are too simplistic, where increased functionality is recommended, which trends, hypotheses, and metrics to use, and what common mistakes might be avoided.
Personalization is also highly important. The best fintech applications quickly become the user’s preferred financial dashboard. The ability to set the interface up according to their preferences is crucial, with all the readings that are most relevant to them in view, and their favorite tools just a tap away.
How AI tools are improving the design process
AI tools are now able to offer a great deal more to designers during the iteration process. The natural language processing capabilities of AI now hold the promise of allowing these systems to aid in experimentation with variations by iterating designs based on user and designer feedback with a rapidity that human designers simply can’t match.
Generative AI comes into play here, too, by offering designers a highly efficient and productive way to generate a plethora of realistic data to test different design versions in production and look at them through the end user’s eye. These can include populating platform components, such as tables, charts, order issue forms with correct and meaningful data.
Besides working as a business analyst who provides design teams with data, generative AI can help with brainstorming by providing alternative layouts, color palettes, and typography choices, until the right combination is achieved.
Although we don’t use gen AI for this use case in our work, we still believe when a team is small and there’s a lack of experience, some teams can find it useful. If time allows, experimentation and testing can continue until a suitable balance between elements and design priorities is achieved.
AI helps to generate hypotheses about what will be valuable to a user. Specific third-party plugins provide reports on how users navigate, where they click, and even how they get around certain clunky design choices.
These tools can assist UX/UI design specialists to analyze immense quantities of user behavior data and synthesize these into actionable insights and hypotheses, such as structural suggestions and expected features. Before AI, the analysis of in-app behavior patterns was a discretionary process that was also much more laborious and led to many available insights being overlooked.
No interface is perfect, we’ve all had the experience of having to work around certain products in order to get what we want out of them. AI is particularly good for spotting these niggles.
The changing role of UX/UI designers
As AI starts to handle more of the heavy lifting in UX/UI design, the role of designers is gradually shifting into more of a supervisory role as design strategists, rather than solely as creatives on the front line of the process.
AI-powered design, research, and testing tools are freeing today’s designers from some of the more repetitive tasks they may have been lumbered with in the past, and are also providing significant cost reduction for clients contracting UX/UI design services.
These tools now allow them to make design decisions that are data-driven, and encourage them to assume a more executive role in which they can direct the design process in accordance with the right product approach.
Having more than just their own opinions to back up their design choices, designers are also able to test out new approaches that may have been overruled by a play-it-safe approach in the past. This is particularly relevant to fintech design where designers are often encouraged to stick with what has worked in the past, rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel.
The part with the statistics
A 2024 paper, titled AI-Driven UX/UI Design: Empirical Research and Applications provides some interesting statistics regarding the quiet revolution that’s taking place in UX/UI design.
According to the research conducted by the authors of the study, 78% of the fintech companies they surveyed stated that they had started implementing AI technologies in their UX/UI design services over the past two years. Additionally, 76% of the fintech apps in question were using AI to tailor user interfaces based on individual preferences and behaviors.
Digital banking apps were shown to be leading the charge when it comes to AI design adoption. 89% of digital banking applications were said to be incorporating some form of AI-driven design features. Investment apps ranked second at 83%, while insurance applications came in third at 71%.
User engagement appears to be one of the areas where AI-driven design can offer great improvements. The fintech firms surveyed in the above study were shown to experience a variety of user engagement improvements by implementing AI-assisted design procedures.
User retention was said to have improved by 37%, transaction frequency by 28%, time spent in the app by 42%, and feature discovery showed the greatest improvement at 53%. All this while reducing customer support interactions by 31%.
Conclusion
Far from being a negative for human designers, AI-assisted design tools are empowering them to create improved interfaces and user experiences by informing their design choices with actionable user behavior findings.
AI is able to analyze specific tried-and-tested solutions to spot patterns that would be unavailable to the human eye, all while allowing the iteration process to be conducted at a rate that was previously unimaginable.
For fintech firms, this is leading to a new generation of user interfaces that can break previous molds, anticipate the needs of users, and adapt accordingly. The new generation of AI tools promises to transform buzzwords such as “intuitive” and “personalized,” from marketing hyperbole to a lived experience for users.
Get in touch with us to discuss UX design tailored for fintech solutions.