UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils (00:00)
Here we go. Welcome back to the podcast UX Design to Win in Business. Last week, I spoke to Pietro from Fuel Lab, and we had a very engaging discussion about where user experience design meets the results of his work in search engine optimization. And today, I want to talk to you about a real world example with one of our

longer time customers already, the Fintech startup Clevercards in Ireland. I'm your host, Niels. I have been working in user experience since many years now. I've traditionally been a web developer and worked as a lead designer at SumUp a while back and have tons of experience with

designing websites and apps and working at the intersection of front end development. And I'm here to talk to you about the topic of user experience in general, to demystify the term and to show you and to surface, to show you as a business owner, how you can apply user experience design to your organization to...

win in business to actually be more successful and to understand what it takes in today's digital landscape, what it takes to be successful. And I want to do that with the aforementioned example of today. So clever cards, they have a very interesting history. They started as a gift card business. So you could buy

digital gift cards and send them to your friends and then they could trade them in at individual vendors and locations. And at some point, we're frustrated with the limitation of the individual vendors, like just a selected amount, and started to transition into just issuing digital mastercards.

And that is what they do today for bigger companies. So you as a company's finance manager, for example, can sign up for clever cards and you can start to issue individual master cards that just end up on your phone. Like you never receive a piece of plastic. You just go into your Apple Pay, just like that.

And then you have the clever cards, master card in there. And what's so genius about this is that usually for the use case of digital expense cards, for example, or company expenses in general, when employees travel, usually there's like a one or two or five company credit cards that get handed around and then either

employees use those to pay for expenses or employees go around, pay for their own expenses and then get reimbursed. And all of this is of course management mess. And CleverCards saw the opportunity to go into this space and use their ability through their partnership with MasterCard to issue MasterCards instantaneously to leverage this to

to have the ability to give out digital mastercards to every employee in the company and even be able to kind of limit the amount of money that's available on there or to limit the individual purpose that this card is meant to be for. So maybe one team has a digital mastercard to pay for the AWS bills and nothing else. So they can't go and use this in a restaurant. And...

So very interesting business idea. One of the bigger players in Europe to go into this space. And they started to talk to us a couple of years back about user experience. Their founder, Keelan Lennon, approached us through an old connection. And when onboarding, he told me something that I never heard.

formulated this way directly from a business owner that really stuck with me. And I want to share his wisdom, wisdom basically, and the way that he talked about it today on the podcast, because I think it's a great example of how user experience is actually something that encompasses your entire company. So the way that Clever Cards was set up from the very beginning, since

It's a fintech and it has, well, digital interactions that have to be very secure. They had a large engineering team that built the product in the beginning, right? Like they have to talk to MasterCard, they have to take care of everything being very secure and that it works in every situation and so on. And so their engineering team...

was very capable, but was lacking designers in general. So they started with the backend, so to say, and worked their way to the front end. And that's where we came in. And Keelan said when he came to us that to build their next product, he wants this to be led by user experience design. And what he meant by that is,

that if you're an engineering team on a FinTech company, and I know what he was talking about because I had many experience, like many touch points with FinTechs in my past. And since financial transactions and everything around money is of course always very intricate and complicated,

Those companies tend to have the problem or I don't even know if it's a problem, but there's this tendency that the engineering team dictates a lot of how the user experience will play out in the end because they start to build the platforms out of requirements, out of ISO certifications, out of security requirements, out of everything to their best knowledge, of course.

But since it's an intricate and complicated matter, there's of course always the danger of the user experience being not so super great since they have a complicated product to work with. And so what Keelan wanted for his new product was a platform for organizations to issue their own employee benefit.

cards as just described in the intro. And so the customers of this platform would, since it's a B2B product, this is not for individuals. This is for other companies who want to be able to give out expense cards to their staff. So the customer of this platform would be financial managers.

maybe HR people, but staff internally responsible for enabling their employees to do stuff. So he wanted those people to be able to use this platform as seamlessly and as easily as possible. And he knew that this was

a relatively special crowd, like they have the tools financial managers use on a daily basis, are of course something very different from what other people use in their job. So whatever we build had to fit in that workflow. And the only way to do that is to actually talk to individual

financial managers to HR people, to people from this ICP, from this ideal customer group, to learn what it would take for them to incorporate a tool where you could give out digital expense cards. What it would take this tool to be integrated in their workflow so they would feel comfortable using it. And I think I was very impressed by

and reaching out just like that because he knew exactly what would have to happen. And I think if we try to demystify user experience and how it will help your organization, then this is a very good example of how to think about it because...

Since we as a UX design agency were included at the very beginning of the process, we could work with everyone on the company to make this user journey happen. And that is on the one side, of course, the engineering team. That is on the other side, the customer who would use this product. But that is always everyone in between. So there's the product manager who

would prioritize the next features to be built. And there would be the internal UI designers who had to make the user interface for this product. But there's also the support staff, for example. And I think this is actually a bridge to the topic that I really want to get to today, is that we're all aware of

the fact that a platform has to be usable so customers can self -service the best way possible. But in this case, since there was a lot of money involved and since this is still a B2B product, Clever Cards faced the challenge for their busiest time of the year every year.

that they only had so many people in customer support that could answer a phone. And traditionally around Christmas time, there's like a huge surge in requests for customer employee benefit cards because companies will tend to give those out to their employees for Christmas as a Christmas gift, so to say. So

For clever cards, it was really not only the question of will my customers be very happy to use my product or, you know, will the user experience just be generally very nice. And for them, it was a scaling issue because they knew with this many people on my support staff, I can only serve so many customers because every second of them will call me on the phone.

and ask for support and ask like, can I do this for my car? Can I change the mount later? Can I actually add two more? Can I this and that and so on. So last year during the summer, we had this last minute sprint with Clever Cards with the mission to cut customer support requests in half for the upcoming Christmas season. And we...

wanted to accomplish this by basically just improving the user experience of their portal and where customers would self -serve. And so in a matter of, I think, only six weeks, maybe only even five, we started with what we usually do by asking the end customer, in this case, financial managers, asking them, showing them

Wireframes that we came up with clickable prototypes to understand how they would work, which exports they need, how they would work with Excel or any other spreadsheet software to set up the lists of employees who would get a card with this and that amount and so on and so on. And by this, we're able to prioritize which features would be built in which fidelity together with the product manager. And so

to cut a long story short, by end of November, they were able to launch a new feature set on how to self -service with these employee benefit cards. And we only knew, I think by end of January, when the numbers were really in, of how successful we've been. And Jillian, the product manager at the time, came back to us and said, guys, seriously, this was...

exactly what we needed. We were able to serve double the customers than we did the year before. And this is a success that we were largely able to pull off through the various user experience improvements that we put in. And so I wanted to share the story with you because I think it really makes transparent where user experience design

is not just a singular, it's not one person's job in your company. You don't just have this one designer and they will make everything fine. Like this is an effort that the entire company has to uphold and to look out for. So sure there's the design and then the engineering team follows this, but the entire process of making a product that is

that is this well -designed to self -serve by the customers that takes everyone in the company and also the vision of everyone in the company that this is possible. To set this goal and to then make it possible, that is not one person's job, that is everyone's job.

This is the way we think about user experience at Dinghy. And this is what we're going to talk about in the podcast in the upcoming weeks and months. Because I really want to close in on this topic. And so this is the end for this podcast episode. For next week and for the weeks to come, I have already a list of great guests that will come onto the show.

to extend on these examples on how user experience works, where to apply it, how to get into the work mode that will guarantee your business win through user experience. Thanks for listening. Bye.