How can UX improve efforts to drive financial literacy?

For a majority of people, the topic of money brings about a ton of stress whether it's struggling to pay bills or keeping on track with their budget. As technology and finance become more intertwined, it’s now more important than ever to design products and interfaces that make personal finance more accessible!

Products such as Mint have been immensely successful as it provides a broad level overview of your financial health. You can link all your bank accounts, investments, and debt to keep you on track with your personal goals. Mint from the start of their product development sought ways to differentiate themselves from the competition and they did so by making a dead simple product that gets you running within a few clicks. I’d say their key strength was the automation in tracking your budget. Instead of manually categorizing each purchase, Mint’s algorithm automatically identified the category and really made budget tracking that much easier.

The goal of UX is to fundamentally solve problems that make life easier for users. A customer journey map and use case workshops are a few UX workshops that can be invaluable to help identify the current pain points of users. There are hundreds of problems people may potentially struggle with when interacting with consumer financial products and this has subsequently led to the boom in the fintech space.

Successful consumer fintech products will streamline some part of that customer journey to learn about retirement, simply pay a bill, or learning to create your first budget. Good UX is extremely necessary and instrumental in streamlining a customer’s journey from point A to point B. Without UX — more problems will be created and not solved. Being customer-first, user-first, and investing resources to validating solutions is a core aspect of building a great product.