Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives

Embedded Finance: Personalization, AI, and Meeting Diverse User Needs

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Join Michael Lewandowski and Joseph Johansen (JJ) as they dive into the complexities of designing for diverse users in financial services. From graphic design beginnings to leading UX XD, JJ shares his journey and experiences across consumer, small business, wealth management, and corporate sectors. They discuss the chicken-and-egg dilemma of targeting users versus starting with needs, and how the right approach depends on the problem at hand. Learn about data-informed personas, the challenges of scaling design in large organizations, and the balance between qualitative and quantitative research. It's a real talk about creating believable user experiences in finance.


Josh Lucas:

You are listening to Method's Build what's Next Digital Product Perspectives presented by Global Logic. At Method, we aim to bridge the gap between technology and humanity for a more seamless digital future. Join us as we uncover insights, best practices and cutting-edge technologies with top industry leaders that can help you and your organization craft better digital products and experiences.

Michael Lewandowski:

Hello everyone. I'm Michael Lewandowski and I'm the lead of our financial service practice here at Method. Today's topic in the podcast is building off of a tech talk that we had recently in which we explored designing for different purposes within financial services. After that event, me and one of the panelists, joseph Johanson or JJ, who's here with us from US Bank, continued that conversation over a drink and we really just wanted to take where we were starting and expand on that and bring it to this audience here today. Our conversation today will really resolve around how to design for different users within financial services, covering everything from determining who to target all the way through how future technology may be able to enable us to create experiences for diverse experiences for different types of users. But before we jump on in, I want to go ahead and allow JJ to introduce himself. So, joseph, please tell us a little bit about your background, some of the things that have informed your perspective on design.

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah, I love it. Thanks for having me. In terms of my background, I've got a pretty diverse background when it comes to where I started. So I started actually in graphic design doing marketing materials and billboards and things like that. Did that for a couple of years and realized, loved the design side of it. But you know, ux XD was more where my interest was, so went back to school, came out and did that and so professionally I would break my experience into three parts.

Joseph Johansen:

So one is designing experiences for financial institutions, which has. One is designing experiences for financial institutions, which has become my bread and butter. And I've designed for all sorts of customers and segments, hence the conversation we were having Started in consumer, then small business, wealth management, corporate, commercial, institutional. So really the full spectrum and that's where I'd say the bulk of my experience has been. But also an area that I'm pretty passionate about is around design thinking and the problem-solving side of design.

Joseph Johansen:

I had an opportunity to work with Stanford and the D School immerse in design thinking, have worked with Carnegie Mellon and their methodology, as well as Luma and some others.

Joseph Johansen:

So I have a pretty broad view of the tools and the frameworks and the different approaches that designers take and the background behind that. And then also teaching, and I have a lot of passion about training the next generation and helping them to have a good footing. So I taught for eight years at the Art Institute in Charlotte and had a really great time there and my favorite was actually had a chance to teach a portfolio course, which is where you had, you know, xd, ux designers, photographers, x, d U X designers, photographers, illustrators, fashion marketers and culinary artists come together and help them put together the portfolios to showcase their work and really that kind of melting pot of ideas in that academic setting I find really invigorating. So I try and find opportunities to bring that back along the way. And really that culmination of deep focus on financial services, really digging in hard into problem solving and how design is a great tool for solving problems, and then instructing, educating, inspiring and helping others kind of come together.

Michael Lewandowski:

I love it, jj. That's why it's always so fun to speak with you. I think that rich set of experiences that you've had, the ways that you think about it, both in terms of actually delivering to end clients, but then also educating others on how to bring that forward and apply those tools, those techniques, to really be able to deliver value, is really what we'll dig into deeply today and what we're excited about your insights on is really what we'll dig into deeply today and what we're excited about your insights on. So let's start difficult right. So I think one of the more challenging problem statements for financial services companies to take on is really knowing where to begin.

Michael Lewandowski:

What users should they be targeting for a particular strategy? For me, it's sometimes a little bit of a chicken and an egg when we're dealing with clients, and so is it the traditional strategy approach in which you're identifying a large target market, you're then trying to figure out what penetrations have been like across those populations for different product mixes across time, to look at needs or to some of the different types of experiences where you draw from. Is it more of a disruptive innovation approach where you start with unmet needs and then you figure out what products and experiences you're going to develop and how to expand from a smaller market to a larger. A pretty loaded question of chicken and the egg, but I'm really curious what have you seen work in different instances across your career, and just how do you even begin the process of starting to figure out what the right audience is for a given product, a given experience, a given strategy?

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah, so chicken or egg, I'd say chicken and egg. You know we do both and I've had success with both. I think it, going back to my intro, it really depends on the kind of problem that we're trying to solve. Is it a groundbreaking like? Is it a mature product space and we're trying to evolve the product? We know the customers, we know how they use it today, but we don't necessarily know how they're going to use a new feature. Or is it something that's net new and really hasn't been thought about and needs to be kind of cultivated and understood, like you're nurturing the flame to build the fire, kind of a metaphor. I think it really depends.

Joseph Johansen:

A mature product space, then typically you've got a lot of data to go on. You may not always know what data you have because a lot of times, as products mature and develop, the use cases are new and they span silos that may not currently share data, and so I think for that, you know, definitely going across the silos and really trying to understand the data across the whole journey or the whole potential experience is going to be really important, and a good place to start hasn't existed in the way that you're thinking about it then, starting with the users. Understanding their needs, understanding what makes them tick, is going to be really powerful. Give you those aha moments that help you create the right feature set to meet them.

Michael Lewandowski:

And so let's talk about maybe an example, then, jj, of where have you seen an organization actually thoughtfully start an effort to identify an end user group. That was the right approach for the right situation. So you know, I think it'd be great for the audience to hear some examples of you know. Where did the approach match the situation? And maybe others. Maybe it was a wrong approach for the wrong time, based on it being an incumbent project, product or a new product.

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah. So I'll give two examples.

Joseph Johansen:

So one example this was, let's say, five years ago was focused in the wealth management space and we were trying you know there had been numerous attempts across numerous financial institutions to create, you know, budgeting, financial planning type tools very consumer friendly, that had stickiness to them and a lot of good attempts but weren't really successful, and so really trying to understand why that was such a struggle Was it that we didn't understand the client and their need, or that we weren't solving the problems in the right way, or what that was and in this case, what we found? So we took a quarter and we basically sliced it up into like, okay, we're going to spend time with stakeholders and the clients and understand who they are, what makes them tick, we're going to go really broad, identify a number of different ways to potentially solve the problem, and then we're going to triangulate with data. And so we did a mix of, you know, qualitative research, quantitative research. We did it. One of the challenges I think that designers often run into is, you know, there's there's typically like UX research, and then there's market research, and there's you know, you can put the quotes around the different kinds of research, and we don't necessarily use that full spectrum and we can get more into details on that later. But what we found is that by really being deliberate, focusing on what the immediate problem was that we needed to solve, triangulating the data around that problem, we could very quickly make confident decisions and move forward. And that worked really, really well. Now we had a full team dedicated for a full quarter to make that work. That's not always feasible, right? Especially if you're in a small lean startup, and one of the advantages of working in a large organization at scale.

Joseph Johansen:

Other examples, like there was a time I was working in more of the new product innovation space and we were working on, as a good example, we were working on voice. You know, voice recognition, voice authentication, different things like that, and we had to make um, small steps very quickly, um and and and. So we were able to kind of like so a big part of the. The challenge was how would different people in different scenarios respond to using voice? So if I'm in LA, everybody's driving, I'm in my car. That's probably more comfortable than if I'm in New York in the subway and, and you know that I'm worried about who's looking over my, my shoulder.

Joseph Johansen:

So we had some hypotheses we wanted to test. We did go into location, but it was like within a week or two we had to get an answer to that kind of a problem and then move forward with other problems. So one a little bit larger, a little bit maybe more waterfall. We figured out what we wanted to accomplish over the quarter, and then we went after and did it One a bit more agile. Where we were, you know it was a smaller problem in a very specific set of contexts, and we're able to move forward that way.

Michael Lewandowski:

I love each of those examples and how they exemplify that the problem space warrants a different type of approach, and so let's peel back the onion a little bit and dive deeper into. You know what that really looks like within a large organization. I think that's where you referenced you were at the time with you know you have lots of resources. You really are working within a large institution, a large budget, lots of different folks to your market research. Your others focused in on it. How do you start to actually define end users? And maybe we start with? You know techniques. You know what have you found helpful?

Michael Lewandowski:

I think personas is an interesting one, maybe to start the conversation on. You know I think personas is an interesting one, maybe to start the conversation on. I think within large financial institutions, personas have both been helpful and, to some extent, a distraction. I think they're helpful in getting smaller teams really honed in on who they're actually servicing, what those needs are and what that problem and solution space look like. But there seem to be not necessarily the stickiness of personas and it seems to be something people are continually struggling to understand the long-term implications of and they're trying to recreate those too frequently. So let's stick with personas for a minute, and then let's talk about other techniques around that. Where have you seen personas used effectively in either of those scenarios or other ones across your career, and what do you think some of those keys are within that definition and their usage process that make it, you know, a useful tool in that?

Joseph Johansen:

instance, yeah, yeah. So when it comes to personas, I think the key is are they believable, right, like? Not just believable in the sense that, oh, I have confidence in them, but like, is there data to back up the persona that you're? You're putting out there and and asking me as a stakeholder, or a designer or a developer or whoever it is who's who's being asked to buy in to the, the persona and, and you know, making sure that that that like, you've got the data behind it. I think you you can start with imprecise data and build.

Joseph Johansen:

So I'm thinking in the case of, like, a smaller team or a startup, you may not have a, you know, robust research team that's gone out there and done all the work and created the personas over time on those guesses until it's bulletproof, but I think you do have to have some level of buy-in. I know we're focusing on the successes, but where I've seen personas fail is when you're building a journey around a persona and the people don't buy in or believe that that's either the right or a valid persona. I think personas are really great when you're crossing silos and both parts you know, both. Like if you're crossing organizational boundaries within a larger organization. Again, that's where I primarily work. Even if those personas operate in different ways, within different parts of the organization, you can still create coherent journeys and experiences that take the customer or the client through that full experience.

Michael Lewandowski:

I think believable captures it perfectly, captures it perfectly. There's many instances where I've come in and a client has some of their business partners questioning the target personas and there's this confusion around what the intent of them are. Do they need to map specifically to existing user groups? Can we quantify that? So let's maybe just spend a moment talking about what does a believable persona look like, or what should constitute a believable persona, and you know maybe some of the techniques that you're using to inform that, to make it believable for audiences yeah, yeah, so I mentioned before it needs to be data informed.

Joseph Johansen:

so and and going back to like our initial part of the conversation, when you're identifying users, you start with you know your pool of potential, you know your what's, the universe of potential users or customers, and then slice and slice and slice until you get down to more of the persona level. And I think that is important, especially with a large, established company, because you can quantify the impact of the persona on the organization, like, how much should I care about this particular user group? Without that, when you're talking with you know business partners or stakeholders, it's hard. You know if they don't agree, then it, then it's hard to get them to buy in. So somehow, based on the data that you have, figuring out how to quantify impact is, I think, a key part of it.

Joseph Johansen:

Quantify impact is, I think, a key part of it, but that alone isn't enough. The other part is and I know we can get into, like the nuanced, like you know behaviors and attributes. You know there's all kinds of buzzwords you use and they change over time. One thing you'll find about me is my approach to all of this is very pragmatic. I go for what works. I'm not as focused on a specific approach or boundary on what is or is not acceptable, but when it comes to personas like, yes, we should capture what are the attributes that make them who they are. But then I think it's also important as we're validating those in research with different experiences pulling in examples, pulling in real voice of the customer that aligns back to the personas that you're using can be really powerful, like the persona by itself. It's a document that helps you get in the right frame of mind as you're designing, but if you can't back that up with real people, real voices, then you're going to have a harder time keeping that believability.

Michael Lewandowski:

I love how you frame that and, if I position it just slightly differently, I think I hear you really advocating for what are the behavioral components and what's the qualitative ways that you can really understand what the needs are and articulate those to your stakeholders who are developing solutions for users, but not ignoring whatsoever the quantitative aspects of it, not only in terms of how can you help communicate the relevance of that persona to the business and business objectives, but ultimately, how can you track. You know what you're delivering and whether it's adding the value that you are forecasting as part of the way that you're prioritizing different design and different product features.

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah, absolutely. And then tying it back to real voices, real people. So you build the persona right, which is your best guess, or your best approximation of a slice of your customer base. And then, as you interact with real customers and you hear them talk about their experiences, whether they're good or bad, and they align to the persona that you've established. That makes them real, it makes them human. You've established, you know that. That makes them real. It makes them human instead of just a and cause. I think that is one of the challenges of personas is they can become so vague and abstract that it's it's hard to really connect them to the product or the features or the capabilities that you're creating.

Josh Lucas:

And so I think.

Joseph Johansen:

but, like it's natural, we do the kind of research typically to to like validate with real customers how things are or are not working for them. But doing those interviews and pulling out like actual verbatims or, if you can't play video, having actual quotes of you know what this person is experiencing in this particular situation, you know, kind of tying it back to the persona, can be really, really powerful.

Michael Lewandowski:

Yeah, no, I think. Just you know, finishing that point, you can't undervalue a really good verbatim from a client. That summarizes a theme that you're seeing in the data based on the number of participants and users that you've actually conducted research for, as a way to carry forward the message around why this is a needed feature or design aspect that needs to be included in a product. And then, similarly, you know the quant needs to be there to support the business?

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah, absolutely, and it's a virtuous cycle, right, correct? You learn more, you evolve To your point earlier. Your question earlier about, like, how often do you tinker with personas, like really you shouldn't have to tinker with them too much, really you shouldn't have to tinker with them too much? Um, where, where I've seen, because you build alignment around the persona and it's big picture broad, um, that's probably not going to change too much. It will change some and I have seen companies that have like rigidly held on to personas too long and then they become stale and not not helpful. But I've also seen it where it's like, okay, we've learned this thing, so we have to tinker with the persona and keep changing it, and that can be a real challenge.

Joseph Johansen:

Where I see change beneficial to personas is when silos are merging or the way the business interacts with this particular kind of persona is changing. I saw it. I'll date myself a little bit here, but when you think back to the origins of online banking or even mobile banking, you didn't have one seamless, integrated experience. You went one place to manage your accounts, a different place to do a wire transfer, a different place to do an ACH transfer, a different place to manage your investments or your wealth right, and each of those had their own personas or variations on personas that they would work with. Well, as those came together, it became important that the personas kind of came together and evolved so you could again carry that user vision through the whole experience, not just a particular piece of it, as it had originally been a vision.

Michael Lewandowski:

Yeah, you hit a couple of topics that I wanted to address with you and our audience today, and the first was going back to how long should a persona last for, and I do think we see lots of organizations struggle with one or the other. They have a tendency to proliferate, where maybe one vertical develops a set of personas and another vertical develops a set of personas, even though this is uniformly one customer base. I've seen other instances where it feels like they're taking a persona and trying to take it down to a level to meet a specific need that's beyond the intent of a persona, and maybe they're getting down to specific jobs to be done within a particular offering or service that's provided by that company. And so I think those are some challenges that we frequently see. Organizations get confused around the language and maybe the purpose of things, and it ties back to what you said earlier. Really, it should be about what are we trying to achieve?

Michael Lewandowski:

here, and, regardless of the approach or whatever tools and techniques we're going to use, what makes sense for us and what do we need to know to be able to be confident and to be able to make the decisions that give us the confidence to go ahead and move forward and put good product in market for our customers?

Joseph Johansen:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And just thinking about what you're saying, like, I know we're focused on personas right now, and you know personas are a tool, they're a construct that we put together to understand. You know, a particular part of our customer base, right and or employee base, or whoever it is that we're trying to we're trying to focus on, and I think, as with any tool, it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that it is a tool. You know people get very religious and you know almost zealot about like it must be this, that or the other, and and really for me, it goes back to like, what's the problem we're trying to solve? Does this tool solve that problem? If not, like, do we need to modify the tool or is it a different tool that we need to use? And I use that approach pretty regularly when it comes to personas and others.

Michael Lewandowski:

I love that. Well, let's go ahead and take a pause here for a few moments, because when we come back, I want to go ahead and dive a little bit deeper into some of the diverse types of users that you find within financial services, and you've got a great background for that. But we're going to go ahead and take a pause now and we'll return the conversation here shortly, sounds good.

Josh Lucas:

Thank you for joining us on Build what's Next Digital Product Perspectives. If you would like to know more about how Method can partner with you and your organization, you can find more information at methodcom. Also, don't forget to follow us on social and be sure to check out our monthly tech talks. You can find those on our website. And finally, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss out on any future episodes. We'll see you next time.