You’ve downloaded a new fintech app. Excited by how it will make it easier to receive payments from your clients, you’re all set to create an account. Twenty minutes later and you’re still busy onboarding…
What do you do? Do you continue? Or, do you delete the app and switch back to the payment system that has worked for you till now?
If you stick it out, you’ll be the exception. More than 68% of consumers already abandon a fintech app during onboarding.
This is just one reason why UX is important. Without intuitive design, your target audience will likely never get to test your innovative features.
Continue reading to find out how you can improve user adoption — and engagement — with design.
The Role of UI/UX in Building Trustworthy Fintech Products
When users are interacting with a fintech product, they’re sharing very sensitive information directly tied to their finances. Sure, there are regulations that govern the fintech industry, but that’s hidden in some 40-page document written in industry jargon.
Your UI and UX are what they see daily. These elements have a more obvious impact on how credible your product feels.
Trust also keeps users coming back to your website. A confusing interface or frustrating authentication process can also destroy that trust, even if your security is robust.
Key Principles of UI/UX Design for Fintech
Building Trust Through Security
Where ecommerce brands build trust via money-back guarantees, refund policies, and product reviews, fintech products use features like robust encryption, authentication processes, and privacy policies. It’s key that your fintech UI/UX design incorporates enough security measures to protect sensitive user data without adding too many steps to the user journey. For example, giving users the option of using biometric authentication instead of typing in a password can streamline the log-in process without sacrificing security.
Clean and Intuitive Interfaces
Financial terms and transactions can be intimidating. To help make your product more accessible, you can use familiar navigation and jargon-free menus. The challenge of creating your interface is that while you want your website or app to be revolutionary (like your product), it’s best to stick to conventional navigation.
First-time users should find their way around your website or app easily, while irregular users should remember where to find specific information. You can, for instance, use interaction design, to guide them where to click.
The benefit of adding interactive elements is that your interface becomes more engaging and feels more responsive. This way, you can make your product feel new and exciting, even when you settle on standard navigation.
Tailored User Experiences
Users expect personalized experiences when they interact with service-based industries like finance. This can take the form of a customizable interface or dashboard and tailored content. Features like personalized insights and advice based on users’ financial goals and history encourage engagement.
Accessible Design
Money is universal. This means that your user base will include people of different ages, abilities, and levels of digital literacy. It’s more than a matter of usability. A fintech website/app that’s easy to read, navigate, and understand makes users feel respected and valued.
Consistent Feedback
Responses like a button that changes color when clicked, a ping when you’ve made a payment, or a small vibration when you’ve entered an incorrect password keep users informed. It makes them feel more in control, even though there’s no physical money to count.
It’s also an opportunity to reinforce your brand identity. Subtle sounds and reassuring animations can make the fintech user experience an emotional connection.
Read Also: Best Practices for Fintech App Design That Attracts Users
Proven Fintech UX/UI Design Strategies to Improve Your Project
Design With Industry Compliance
Financial services operate under strict frameworks. Some of these, like CAN-SPAM and fair lending laws apply across the board, governing your marketing design to outbound collections. An added challenge is that if you serve an international audience, you’ll need to design around various regional regulations too.
If you ignore these rules, you could face fines, bad reviews, or getting shut down. Then, there’s reputational damage. All that trust that you built by editing your policies, deciding where to display trust signals, etc. can be wiped out, a difficult setback from which to get back.
Industry compliance doesn’t just apply to how you run your business, but also how you design your interface. Areas to pay attention to include how you collect personal data and handle authentication.
To help with data collection, use clear consent prompts. You can, for example, use toggles, checkboxes, and contextual explanations so that users understand what they’re agreeing to.
As for authentication, you can use a combination of validation messages and fraud detection alerts. Aside from reducing errors, these notifications can also help prevent fraudulent transactions.
You can also use design to ensure that users meet rules and regulations. For instance, if they’re required to read a contract first, you can use a pop-up notification with a checkbox that they must first tick before they can submit their application. Then, set up your dashboard in such a way that these documents, along with past transactions, can be reviewed easily.
Follow Security Principles When Designing
As fintech products handle sensitive personal and transactional data, they’re prime targets for cyberattacks. Aside from protecting users’ bank account details, ID numbers, etc. from cyber criminals, incorporating security principles into your design is one more way that you build confidence.
Let compliance and regulatory requirements guide you, but also design for data privacy by default. For example, avoid showing full account numbers and use masking and partial display for other sensitive fields like passwords.
Authentication is another step in the user flow that you’ll want to prioritize. From the start, guide new users to set up a strong password. You can include this in your onboarding steps and share microcopy on your website to highlight why certain security steps exist. For example, instead of simply reminding users to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA), add a short explanation as to what it is and why it’s more secure.
Then, you can also incorporate key UI/UX patterns to make users feel more comfortable and indicate secure entry points. For example, showing password requirements upfront reduces errors, while displaying password strength indicators guides them visually to creating a stronger one.
You can also offer biometric login as an option. It’s secure and more user-friendly than having to retype your password each time. It will also reduce the number of password reset requests!
Use a Consistent Design Language Across Your Product
With all the jargon and multiple steps, it’s easier for users to get confused (even intimidated) when they’re browsing a fintech website or interacting with the app. Applying different design styles across the pages and screens will only add to the confusion.
First, ensure that you’ve applied your branding elements consistently. In other words, check that the same colors, typography, and iconography are used across your website, app, and advertising design like your social media ads, digital banners, etc.
The most effective way to keep it consistent is to create a style guide and use a component library. In the style guide, you can document guidelines. Then, you use the library to build reusable components like charts, buttons, and transaction lists from scratch. This way, you don’t need to design these elements from scratch each time and you can ensure that each element looks and behaves similarly.
Show Data Clearly and Simply
Data is power, but only when users can actually understand it. Products in this niche often deal with complex information like projections, percentages, etc, making data visualization integral.
While you have a lot of data available, don’t throw everything at your users at once. Focus on what matters most first.
For example, numbers like account balance and monthly spend are typically more important and need to be shown upfront. Then, you can give users the option of diving deeper, if they want more details about, for instance, pending transactions.
After you’ve decided what to prioritize, choose how you want to visualize it. For example, line charts work well to explain trends over time, while bar charts are better suited for category comparisons.
Learn About Our Fintech UI/UX Service
Customize Elements to Match User Needs
Financial situations, goals, and literacy levels vary dramatically from person to person. Design that recognizes those differences make the user experience more relevant, engaging, and trustworthy.
To do this, you’ll need to make user research part of the UX/UI design process. You can, for example, send out a survey asking them to rate the current features in terms of usefulness and ask potential clients to suggest features they want to see.
In addition to research, also include usability testing. Seeing how actual users interact with your app lets you uncover areas that cause confusion and friction. Plus, if you include testing early on instead of leaving it till the later stages of the design process, you can avoid costly redesigns.
Based on the user feedback and UI/UX audit, you can then customize elements to match their specific needs.
Read Also: Best FinTech Design Agencies To Visually Enhance Your Fintech Product
Implement Real-Time Feedback and Notifications
The nature of financial transactions means that real-time communication is essential. A short lag in communication isn’t a matter of just inconvenience. It could have serious financial consequences. For example, without an instant confirmation that a payment was successful, users might submit the same payment twice.
That said, too many notifications can quickly lead to information overload. Plus, without some level of information hierarchy, an action that needs urgent action, like a failed transaction, suspicious activity, or new login location/device, can go unnoticed.
To help users make sense of all this information, you can use a combination of mobile-push notifications and in-app alerts.
For example, for critical information, you can send push notifications. Then, to add an extra layer of safety, you can set up these alerts so that users must click to acknowledge that they’ve read it.
In-app notifications can be used for other messages like a subscription reminder, changes to contract terms, or investment tips. This way, their workflow will remain uninterrupted.
You can also allow users to opt in or mute specific informational notifications or change the channel (for example, instead of in-app messages switching to emails). Letting users select the type and frequency of notifications they receive is another way that you tailor their user experience.
Whichever notification type you use, ensure that the messaging is clear. Let’s say you need an in-app message to confirm a successful payment. Messaging that includes the amount, action, and beneficiary (e.g. “$5,000 transferred to Duck.design”) offers more context than simply saying “Success”.
In addition to using text, you can also use interactive elements like progress indicators, checkmarks, animations, or status bars after a user performs an action. Elements like these give instant visual confirmation that make financial tasks feel effortless, even fun.
Then, once users know that it doubles up as a trustworthy communication channel, they’ll start to engage more and more with your app. A well-timed notification about the stock market or exchange rate, for instance, makes users feel more connected to the platform and in control, even when the financial sector is volatile.
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Communicate Errors Clearly and Guide Users on Relevant Pages
If you make an error on an eCommerce website, it could be as easy as returning the item. However, reversing a financial transaction is less straightforward.
As such, you’ll want to guide your users to the right next step carefully. Then, if they were to make a mistake, your error handling should be clear and actionable so that they remain confident in your product’s reliability.
The following are some common mistakes fintech products make when reporting errors:
- Sharing an error code without an explanation
- Including technical jargon in the error message
- Failing to explain why an error happened
- Not telling users what they should do next
Imagine the following scenario. A user tries to pay a beneficiary using your banking app. After clicking on the “Pay Now” button, instead of “Payment Successful” the message reads “Error Code 145”. This could mean anything to the user.
Now, compare it to the following error messages:
“Payment unsuccessful. Retry now.”
“Your payment was unsuccessful because the card has expired. Select a different payment method.”
Both are better than the earlier error code, but the last one wins because it reduces any vagueness. It uses plain language to explain the error and why it happened. Then, it goes one step further by offering a clear next step.
Prioritize Accessibility for All Users
While you should tailor your UX and UI specifically for your target audience, when it comes to accessibility, your app needs to cater to everyone. After all, your user research focused on their needs instead of their abilities. So, how do you know what their abilities are?
Here are a few key UI design principles to make your product cater a range of abilities:
- Use high color contrast
- Avoid color flashes
- Add alternative text for images
- Ensure screen reader compatibility
Essential Tools for Evaluating Final UI and UX
Not every fintech founder has the budget or time to bring in a full UX research team right away, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start evaluating your product’s usability.
The following are some lightweight tools anyone can try to spot basic issues:
- ChromeDevTools’ Lighthouse Audit to run a quick UX/UI audit for spotting glaring accessibility issues
- Hotjar to conduct user interaction which will help you to identify areas that cause friction
- Loom for usability testing
- WCAG Contract Checker to ensure your color scheme aligns with accessibility guidelines
That said, these tools are best for spotting surface-level issues. A professional team will understand the why behind the behavior, helping you to create conversion-centered design instead of simply good user experiences.
Real-Life Examples of Successful UI/UX Design for Fintech Projects
Here are two fintech web platforms that show how these best practices come together. Created by Duck.design, let’s look at how user-centered design looks in action.
Ionise
Ionise, a DeFi algorithmic money market protocol operating on the Zilliqa Chain, needed a user-friendly interface to set its product apart. To improve the user experience, and increase user adoption, we:
- Customized the dashboard by highlighting key metrics like daily earnings, supply balance, and borrow balance
- Employed responsive UI/UX design principles to improve usability across different screen sizes and devices
- Applied a visual language consistently by keeping the typography and color scheme the same and using rounded edges for text block across all the pages
- Improved accessibility by using contrasting color schemes (white text against a dark background)
These design choices worked together to increase user adoption by 25%. Not only did Ionise attract more daily active users, but also improved users retention and engagement. The app’s bounce rate decreased by 30%, while users were spending more time on the app.
DarkFusion
For DarkFusion, a product suite using smart contract modeling language to allow developers to deploy tokens on Bitcoin easily, we had a similar goal—create a visually engaging and intuitive interface. This is the UI/UX design process that we took:
- Completed user research to gain insight into their target audience’s preferences and behavior
- Created wireframes and mockups to visualize user flow
- Conducted usability testing and incorporated user feedback to improve the design iteratively
By prioritizing user research, we could improve their branding so that it reflected professionalism, innovation, and trustworthiness. Then, our step-by-step approach meant that we could incorporate their brand identity into the visual language across the pages. The results were as strong as their new brand identity: the number of monthly active users grew by 40% and user interactions on their platform increased by 35%.
The Full UI/UX Design Cycle by Duck.Design Team: From Planning to Implementation and Testing
Because Duck.design offers a wide range of services and has a team of over 100 skilled designers, we can be your full-cycle UI/UX partner. We also have the niche experience required for the regulated, technical industries like fintech.
From prototyping to product validation, each step is informed by user research. We’ll collect data from real users, helping us to define their true goals when using your website or app.
That said, data isn’t only used to serve our team. We know that an effective fintech UI/UX also relies upon data visualization. A key part why they’re using your product is to track performance over time, whether it’s their own financial standing or global markets. A core part of our service is making complex numbers available via an intuitive dashboard. Then, to make these numbers more relevant, we can design the dashboards for different segments.
We understand that many businesses choose to outsource UI/UX design to save costs. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve designed our subscription plans for our UI/UX design services to include unlimited requests and revisions. It’s a cost-effective, comprehensive solution includes a variety of other related services like
- Brand identity design
- Landing page design
- SaaS product design
- Illustrations and infographics
