Banking applications have long become a part of everyday life for many users. And performing activities using game logic in non-recreational contexts, such as making online payments or booking an online service, is a trend that is gaining ground in various sectors, including banking gamification.
Animation, gamification, and brand characters
Banking apps use animation and illustration to move away from the image of serious and complex financial institutions. Many banks go even further and invent a brand persona for themselves. First of all, banks are now going beyond the scope of service and trying to move into the framework of emotions. It’s a good way to add emotion to a product, but it’s only a way, not a panacea.
For example, the characters are not just a fintech story. They have been around for a long time. For example, MailChimp’s monkey, which “chatted” with customers in an informal tone, joked and helped to understand the product itself. Modern banking applications use characters not as assistants but rather as additional elements for a positive experience of interacting with the bank. But by adding more and more characters, animations and games, we risk turning banks into AliExpress, where coins fall on users from everywhere, ads pop out, etc.
Personalization
In addition to visual elements, more and more banks are following the path of personalization — adapting their product to the needs of a specific part of the audience. Personalization is one way a bank can be more customer-oriented. Some go to the app to send money to mom, and some have multiple deposit accounts and a complex financial portfolio. Considering the needs of different audience segments, banks are working to create user-friendly interfaces. To do this, they conduct in-depth interviews and develop different homepage designs for different users.
But personalization is not always useful. There are fixed patterns in design that we are all used to. And when these patterns change just like that, for no reason, users often feel discomfort. Personalization is a good thing when appropriate. There is such a phenomenon of Nokia sound.
Everyone knows it because it was installed by default, and 98% of users never managed to change it. Because they didn’t need a personalized ringtone, they just needed the phone to make some kind of sound. The same with banking.
There is a classic of personalization. For example, light or dark themes, vip interface or other design elements help increase a particular user’s loyalty. However, with the personalization of everything else, you should be careful and study your audience well.
Difficulties in the design of mobile banking applications
The design of banking products is a separate field that has its own characteristics. Due to the great attention to security, the multi-component structure of the bank itself, and the wide audience, application designers encounter certain difficulties.
Security
The banking application stores all information about a person — his income, expenses, confidential data, etc. Therefore, it should be safe. Each bank has its own security department, which very often does not miss certain design ideas. But it is worth understanding that all banks are concerned about security, and the approach to work is different everywhere.
Technical part
Typically, a cool banking app design meets an old, clunky bank backend and comes out the loser. In order to implement some modern ideas, sometimes you just need to get rid of the old banking systems and create them from scratch. But few people can afford it. Also, almost no bank outsources development but makes applications using its own internal team of developers. And these teams are very reluctant to step out of their comfort zone. Therefore, it is necessary to follow the implementation of the design so that all your ideas and concepts are correctly interpreted.
Complex bank structure
The application concept is born at the intersection of business problems, technical limitations, the market state, and the audience’s wishes. And designers should consider all these aspects. Something similar happens in traditional banks. Many separate parts are difficult to “negotiate” with each other, and it is even more difficult to combine them all into one modern and simple application. In contrast, new fintech startups have a more flexible structure. There are also managers responsible for loans, etc. But only the design team decides whether to place a credit banner on the application’s main screen.
A large audience
People want the same experience they’ve had elsewhere. For example, they often say that they want, as in this or that bank application. But repeating the interface of an existing bank does not mean repeating its success. Therefore, the designer is not to be copied but to create a new successful experience that other banks would like to copy.
Second, working with a large audience leads to mediocre design. The team collects the wishes of users but, as a result, receives a very average concept. It will suit a certain part of the audience, but the rest will find it complicated, and others will find it too simple. That is why it is often necessary to move in the direction of personalization in order to move away from mediocrity.
The future of banking applications
Banking products are increasingly digitized, use new technologies, such as augmented reality or artificial intelligence, and generally move away from the image of teller windows, receipts, and queues.
All this indicates major changes in the public perception of banks. And it’s not about the fact that users will get bored of brand characters, and banks will abandon them. It is about the fact that we will have a completely new unified fintech product in the future. A banking tool that will exist in everyone’s life by default.
The emergence of super applications will put product designers in front of a new challenge. They will have to gather all the services and make something convenient. You can already see that this is a difficult task. Now the number of cards and bills has increased, and designers are adding elements to the interface that were not designed for it. Next, they plan to work with shares and create a new application because this one is not adapted for such a complication.
