8 skills of a UX designer in FinTech
By: Julia Bondarenko
Tags: Skills, Design, Fintech, Banking, UX

1. Learn the subject

You have to learn the financial services you are working on and the relevant terminology. For example, working with account receivables is important to know:

Invoice legal definition and meaning.

How fees are applied. E.g. there is a list of fees in Germany and how they are calculated. What does it mean for a designer? For instance, when creating a fee you should automatically calculate it based on an invoice amount. Oh, and there are different types of fees… but that’s another story.

Payment plan.

Payment deferment.

… and many more.

Having your head around the subject will help you to stand out among other designers during an interview process. For a deep understanding you will have an opportunity to learn the subject with the help of Subject matter experts on your project when hired.

2. User research and working with assumptions

User research is hard and expensive to do properly in a specific business area. It requires a set of skills and knowledge of the domain from a user. FinTech projects tend to be formal so it might be hard to even get your hands on actual users. Of course, the following recommendations should work along with proper testing techniques, not instead ☝️

Make yourself comfortable working with assumptions professionally. Learn how to generate assumptions based on ideation techniques and how to validate them. Set success criteria by which you will evaluate whether an assumption has succeeded or failed.

Learn how to generate assumptions based on ideation techniques and how to validate them. Set success criteria by which you will evaluate whether an assumption has succeeded or failed. Find a reliable source of information. In FinTech projects, it is common to have a person who knows the business processes of the project’s specific domain. This person might hold different positions in the company: Subject matter expert, Product Owner, Business analyst. And he/she will provide you the most valuable information about the business needs and the users.

In FinTech projects, it is common to have a person who knows the business processes of the project’s specific domain. This person might hold different positions in the company: Subject matter expert, Product Owner, Business analyst. And he/she will provide you the most valuable information about the business needs and the users. Test prototypes on your team. Of course, this should be held with caution and you should be able to separate biased opinions. However, your team members have soft knowledge about the business domain and can represent a learning curve of the product (which you can rarely test with external users). And don’t miss the chance to test new team members! They can provide a fresh look and you might be shocked by what they discover.

3. Stakeholder management

Stakeholders are busy people. In FinTech designers heavily rely on their input to continue working.

A designer has to clarify system requirements, user stories, metrics, KPIs and who-knows-how-many-other questions with people who know the subject in and out. A designer has to keep the process flowing by receiving the necessary feedback on time. You can master stakeholder management by incorporating the following techniques 👩‍💼👨‍💻

Communicate your expectations on when you need to get the feedback → this actually can help a lot.

on when you need to get the feedback → this actually can help a lot. When sending a document for a review, set up a follow-up meeting with the stakeholder. The agenda might be: “This is a follow-up meeting for the document (link) review. We will discuss your review notes and set our next objectives”. If a stakeholder doesn’t do a review, you can make a walkthrough of the document and gather his feedback directly at the meeting.

with the stakeholder. The agenda might be: “This is a follow-up meeting for the document (link) review. We will discuss your review notes and set our next objectives”. If a stakeholder doesn’t do a review, you can make a walkthrough of the document and gather his feedback directly at the meeting. This goes without saying, but still: always set up a meeting to make a prototype walkthrough and gather feedback on it.

Be proactive in gathering information from people and help them to give you this information. Help stakeholders to research the information if necessary. This is a great opportunity for you to learn the business.

4. Information architecture

IA complicated itself becomes even more complex in FinTech projects. You should be comfortable with analysing high level system concepts. Because you will need to create user friendly navigation for them and make information easily discoverable.

For further reading I recommend:

Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond

A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK Guide). I find it very important to get a head around business analyses but to a certain limit. So choose only relevant chapters 🤓

A concept of a core banking system from which one must design a main navigation (image altered intentionally).

5. Permissions and user roles

A bank branch operator after editing global interest packages across the bank affecting all customers.

The cost of a phrase “Oh, we forgot user roles” lies deep in the system architecture, involving multiple teams to fix it.

This aspect has to be taken into account as early as possible in the project. You might think that for a designer it is not such a big deal, but it may lead to a major redesign of a project.

Depending on the levels of permissions, a designer considers which features can be hidden or displayed in a different mode (Edit vs Read).

(Edit vs Read). How does the screen look like without those features ?

? Does the information architecture support all possible permissions? Can a user with lower permissions reach certain pages or are they blocked ?

? What happens if a user receives a link but does not have permission to view this information? The system can display a read-only form instead of an edit mode. You can show a convenient message that a user does not have permission to see the form of this customer account. Or should he even know that such a customer account exists?

Lay the foundation of user roles at the beginning and grow the complexity of permissions along the way.

6. Formatting and localization

How not following an ISO looks like :)

💰Decimal numbers formatting may be conventionally different in different countries. Further reading on a decimal separator and excerpt of ISO 31–0:

“Numbers consisting of long sequences of digits can be made more readable by separating them into groups, preferably groups of three, separated by a small space. […] Such groups of digits should never be separated by a comma or point, as these are reserved for use as the decimal sign. For example, one million (1000000) may be written as 1 000 000.00” (.00 added by author for clarity)

🗓️ Date formatting is challenging to define for international services. You may decide to use the local date formats for each country. However, with the rising globalization, this approach might be confusing for some people. Imagine a Ukrainian used to dd.mm.(yy)yy format using a German locale (date format yyyy-mm-dd) with an English translation (date format mm/dd/(yy)yy). Insane! Which date formatting to use: by locale or by language (either of which would be foreign for the user)?And even if you decide to use an international date format yyyy-mm-dd, it is still not clear what a month is and what a date is. On the bright side, the international date format brings consistency and is sorted well in a table.

💶 The currency was just a cute icon for me before coming into the FinTech. Soon I have learned that not only using icons for the currency is mostly wrong. But also that there are guidelines for currency formats and ISO 4217.

🌎 Country specific formats may include Customer number, Account number and Bank card number:

Customer number may be defined by a national ID number and is different in different countries. It also depends on the type of a customer: private or corporate. To keep a consistent layout and formatting you may consider adding a zero (0) in front of a customer number to have a maximum defined digits length. Example for a system supporting 11 digit customer numbers: 000450.59410, where 45059410 was the initially provided customer number.

may be defined by a national ID number and is different in different countries. It also depends on the type of a customer: private or corporate. To keep a consistent layout and formatting you may consider adding a zero (0) in front of a customer number to have a maximum defined digits length. Example for a system supporting 11 digit customer numbers: 000450.59410, where 45059410 was the initially provided customer number. Account number has different format and different algorithm of generation in different countries.

has different format and different algorithm of generation in different countries. Bank card number is defined by ISO/IEC 7812. It is important that a card number is masked when displayed or printed. Full card number can be displayed in certain administration systems for authorized users only.

7. Research government regulations

The answer is: maybe.

Usually, FinTech companies have a legal department that keeps everybody up to date about current and upcoming regulations. However it might not always be the case, or they might think that there is nothing to do with the design. Do your research.

In Norway and Australia, it is a legal requirement to satisfy The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA for both public and private sector.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has to be satisfied by all companies who deal with the processing of personal data of EU citizens, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the EU or not.

8. Data visualization

Yes, you need to present numbers in an engaging and actionable way. I do recommend to create a library of flashy financial dashboards to get inspiration from. But take them with a grain of salt and better read the book Storytelling with Data on how to communicate data properly.