User experience will be the battleground for the Irish banksâ rival to Revolut. Hereâs why.
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s Revolut has scaled rapidly to reach 3 million customers in Ireland, the Irish banks AIB, Bank of Ireland and PTSB have responded with their own instant mobile payments service called Zippay, which is due for launch next year. I believe the banks have one shot at getting this right, and user experience will be key to determining if it works.Thatâs where the bar is set, so the UX for Zippay has to be exceptional; it canât be merely acceptable. From launch through to support and every stage in between, there canât be any glitches; it has to be flawless.
This is where design comes in, and by this, I donât just mean what the front-end app screens look like. Iâm referring to the whole experience for everyone involved: the people sending money and those receiving it. The solution to this is not technical, although obviously thereâs a technology component. A really simple experience that simply works, just might be what will get people on board. And you only get this firstly with brilliant design and secondly with user testing.
This principle applies not just to Zippay, but to any brand embarking on a major launch of a new service or app. Basic, bread-and-butter UX is to do the research with real people. We see this over and over: itâs the most efficient and effective way to highlight any potential pitfalls in the user experience.
Here are some of the common issues to watch for in testing.
A key element is that the customer journey all makes sense in the app, and the designers and developers have managed to keep it simple. Think about a classic Revolut use case: how easy it is to split a restaurant bill between friends. Can Zippay deliver that kind of experience?
In the same vein, another sign to watch for is interactions that the designers or developers think are simple â but again, this could be because theyâre familiar with the app. Real user research and testing will uncover if people intuitively grasp what they need to do, or if the design makes them unsure of what step to take.
This brings us to visual hierarchy: designers and developers have a choice of elements to put on a screen, such as buttons, images, and text. Itâs vital to test what people are drawn to: ask the user group how the appâs visual elements help them to do the task they came to do; they donât want to spend time figuring it out.
How speed shapes user perception
Another area where technology plays into the user experience is speed. There has to be no latency. The payment must feel instant, or any delay could give people pause for thought and potentially lose trust. Any lag in the speed of payment processing might lead them to wonder whether it worked or not. This obviously has a technical aspect but people perceive it as part of the experience. Most people donât care or need to know how things work, but where money and payments are involved, they need to know itâs safe, accurate and trustworthy. Another technical aspect to include in testing is the performance loading. Can the system handle the load when multiple users are all making transactions simultaneously?
For a product to win over customers, it has to have triggers, and one of those needs to be that itâs easy. How easy will be determined by how well itâs been tested before launch.
The irony for Zippay is that, as humans, we barely even notice when things work well â but we will definitely remember the things that donât. Thatâs whatâs at stake here.
Great experiences donât just change our behaviour patterns, they change our language. To Google something or to WhatsApp someone are phrases that have become firmly embedded in our everyday lexicon. Think of how often we hear âIâll Revolut youâ. If, in a year or two, we hear people saying âIâll zip youâ, then itâs a good sign that Zippay has been a success.