Don’t do it in a Hurry!

Across industries, businesses, financial institutions, and service providers, there has been a constant focus on establishing omni-channel presence for access to the services offered to the clients. This has resulted in a challenging competition for designers to present innovative and simplistic designs to catch the attention of the customers and the industry. The end-customer is always the beneficiary receiving new updates with a wow factor on the devices. It’s a constant endeavor by designers to understand the psychology of the consumer’s mindset, behavior patterns, predictive decision making and to design the systems accordingly.

On the other hand, the demand of the consumers and the reviewers on this front has increased manifold. There is a constant ‘invisible’ audit. It’s such a thing where each consumer of the service can have their own point of view. We have teasers, pre-launch reviews, launches, forums, day-1 review, day-7 review, day-30 review and many more. This has been fantastic for customers, who are well informed before actually making an investment.

However, in my opinion, the role, industry and requirement for each business user is of paramount importance at the time of freezing or finalizing the design. The requirement of each business, each user, each role is very unique. This should be the primary and the most important factor for decision-making in the constant effort of the service providers to beautify and revamp the screens. There are lots of efforts in terms of ideas which technology companies and service providers invest in to incorporate them into the platforms. The inputs of subject matter experts are critical in designing. The nuances of every business are best understood by the experts themselves. The client accessing the information on a device app for inputting information is totally different from the profile of a back office user of an organization. The ease of usability and the depth of information required is directly proportional to the role of the user. For instance, considering an Insurance business application, the front-end design for a prospect customer navigating an app for policies vs a customer actually buying a policy vs the company representative selling a policy to a customer vs a back office user creating an actual policy for a customer have absolutely varied needs. While a prospect customer requires an intuitive screen which can show him the comparison of the features and premium amounts with minimal information, the customer who buys a policy would require to know all the fine print in the policy before making the premium payment. The sales representative would require analytical data and key selling points of a policy, whereas the back office user in the insurance company would require an application which has the facility to capture detailed information about the customer in the most efficient way.

Although we understand less is good, designers have to do their research, take help of subject matter experts, understand the nature of business, geography of business and many more factors to be able to meet the expectations of the users and receive a pat. For those businesses, financial institutions, service providers who are yet to take the plunge, are being forced to think and re-think to invest in redesigning the UI to increase business and meet the demands of their customers, get appreciation from internal users, peers, competitors, market analysts. This is a critical decision with long-term impact which has to be taken by the product managers along with the overall strategy of the organization. So don’t do it in a hurry.