I Want a Coach in my Banking App
Q: What's the difference between a running app and a banking app?
A: None, both are terrible at helping you reach your financial goals. 😏
A good running app though, like the MY ASICS run coaching app I product managed at AQ until recently, can create personalized training plans and will do wonders for your fitness goals. Mine coached me to the finish line of the Big Sur Marathon in 2014. So, why can't my banking app be more like my running app?
!Proud Big Sur Marathon Finisher
The dashboard syndrome
Banking apps in France are so busy vying for new customers and navigating strict financial regulations that they ignore user needs and satisfy themselves with standard financial dashboard features:
- Account aggregation for you to see how many different bank accounts you were forced to open over the years when your previous bank stopped caring about you
- Pie charts estimates of where your money goes each month regardless of when your salary comes in or whether you even have a steady income
- Estimates of what your global balance will be at the end of the month or how much you've spent in the past month.
So at best you get a fancy-looking dashboard of your account balances and a report on your recent spending, which is not much more info than what a pedometer would read out:
> "You have walked 148,124 steps this month. Well done!"
A pedometer can reliably tell you every day how many steps you took, but it will never actually tell you how to walk more to meet your steps target, if you could even set one up. And this to me is the biggest issues with consumer banking apps. They tell you how much you've spent or overspent but never actually help you set up an adequate and simple budget for your life.
I ran an informal survey with my friends and here are the answers I got. "Do you know how much you can safely spend until your next paycheck?" There were 35 answers, and the results are clear:
My dream banking app
With MY ASICS, we designed an app that acts as a coach from the moment you start using it (with the help of a ton of sports science too of course). The coach would create a customized plan, would be by your side every day until race day, with run targets, run reminders, adapting their advice to your efforts and schedule, laser focused on helping you reach your goal. They wouldn't smile often but when they did, it would be to celebrate your efforts and your progress.
But what shape would a banking app take then? I went back to re-read Chris Messina's post on how apps will disappear and be replaced by short, interactive, pleasant, context-aware interactions with chatbots and I thought: "Hey, sign me up for this app already!"
The banking bot coach
My dream banking bot coach would look at my spending history, analyse it, set an adequate spending target with me, set some reminders and would help me stick with it day in and out! It would be in my face when I'm not following the plan but it would never give up on me.
A better grip on my spending would help me spend smarter, like limit outings when a few bigger bills are about to hit so that I'm never in the red or near it. Finally, while monitoring my spending, my coach would find the right times to set aside a little bit of cash on my behalf to help me save more, just like some apps have started to do.
!Lark, the weight loss app is a treasure trove of good practices
The conversation challenge
Building such a tool would be a major task if only with regards to managing access to the user's banking data, but the design of whole experience, from the onboarding of a first time user to the conversations that this same user would find useful to have with the bot a year later, is a fascinating project. Indeed, how do you communicate the value proposition of a banking tool in a few short sentences, how do you progressively gain the user's trust while balancing the "wow to what the hell" ratio of a first experience, while finding the right balance of natural user input and breathers in the flow of each conversation, and preventing interaction fatigue arising from using the tool for months? I've looked at a number of guidelines around copywriting and interaction design for conversational interfaces and I found Kevin Scott's Usability Heuristics for Bots and Matty Mariansky's Designing the conversational UI guides to be the most helpful.
!Betaworks' Poncho has an excellent new user onboarding flow
In conclusion
I believe we need to move past data visualization hypnosis into the challenge of extracting value from data and offering actionable steps (looking at you FitBit…). This is a challenge I am currently taking on and I hope to share more about it in the next months.
For now, let me ask you to share how you're coaching your users to better fitness, healthier eating, and smarter spending, over months of carefully planned chat interactions, with breakthroughs, setbacks, and countless iterations.
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