Experience Design That Creates Seamless Customer Journeys
Today’s consumers are pretty spoiled for choice when it comes to financial services and fintech offerings. That means that you must make sure your brand offers everything prospects and customers need to make you their number one choice.
Having a killer product or service just isn’t enough (sorry!). You also need to give them a sophisticated, considered, genuine customer journey and experience at every interaction that is both intuitive and fulfilling.
What is Experience Design?
Whether before, during, or after a transactional touchpoint, people’s experiences with your business can have a powerful impact on their loyalty. Experience design is the thought and strategy that goes into making those experiences as positive and relevant as possible. And, its foundation should be built on your digital marketing strategy.
Every experience someone has with your brand, on your website, app, social media pages, or anywhere else will make them feel something. Precisely what that feeling is will depend on how you’ve designed those experiences.
Fintech Experience Design Strategy
A successful experience design strategy must be carefully thought through, organized, and implemented. It means you’re putting your customers (and their needs, expectations, and feelings) right in the center of everything you do, taking the focus away from the technical aspect of your business (not always easy for fintech or financial services brands!)
Want to know more? Here are some elements of experience design that could make up an overall fintech or financial services experience design strategy:
User Flow, Mapping, and Product/Site Architecture
Understanding the path your customers take as they interact with your website or app, the user flow, is crucial in being able to begin your experience design. Mapping out every step they could take helps you better visualize their contact with your brand and makes sure you don’t miss a single potential interaction. And it’s not just about literal steps and maps, it’s also important to weave in the right message and content in the right places as part of those experiences that users go through in order to add clarity and value along the way.
Once you’ve done that, you can create simple yet intuitive architecture to engage prospects and customers and make sure they’re completely satisfied.
UX Design
You might already be aware of UX, or user experience, design. You may even think that’s what we’re talking about here—but there is a distinction between UX design and experience design. UX design generally refers to how users experience and interact with a product, whereas experience design is a more holistic practice, as explained above.
UX design is definitely an integral part of experience design!
Morville’s UX honeycomb helps UX design by explaining the features a product needs to show:
Web Design
The experience prospects and customers have when visiting your website is a fundamental part of their overall experience. Your site should create an intentional impression and also function in the way your brand needs it to, but at the same time, be designed with the customer and their needs at the forefront of any decisions. Web design considers structure and style to help deliver all of that.
Product Design
Product design in the financial services and fintech world, and we are talking about digital products such as web apps, mobile apps, and customer portals, is also a balance of function and experience. It’s critical to get the design aspects right, as this will become the primary touch point for your customers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. There’s a saying that good marketing will kill a subpar product, so focusing on solid product design UX, visual style, interactions, and intuitive use – not just features – will put you in a better position to receive the masses effectively and grow.
Mobile App Design
In the same way as your website and products should be designed with your customers at the heart of them, any mobile apps need to be user-centric. There are specific rules, constraints, and recommendations for mobile app design, so you need to make sure you understand what they are for the best results. And your audience has learned how to use mobile apps and what they like by using other mobile apps, so best practices and common design patterns should be woven into your planning and design as well.
Copywriting and Messaging
Copywriting for all formats and scenarios needs to be laser-focused to build overall customer experience. From website and mobile app copy to email sequences, there’s an art to crafting just the right message, phrases, and sentence structures to engage readers and give them a seamless, high-quality experience interacting with your brand.
Brand and Identity Design
Finally, your overall brand design and market positioning are a crucial part of experience design. The way you keep your customers (and their experiences) in mind should start with your branding – what does your brand stand for, what does it mean to them, and can they identify with your brand. The way prospects and customers perceive your brand and identity is central to shaping their overall experience of your products and services. If they don’t have a positive or compelling perception of your brand, they often won’t even look at your services and products.
Working with CSTMR gives you the support you need to carefully craft your financial services or fintech brand’s digital identity. With a team of passionate experts in multiple aspects of experience design and strategy, we collaborate with you to design holistic, creative, and engaging experiences that perfectly represent your business.
