Industry must incorporate clever and engaging designs

As a family, we are all interested in design – indeed, one of my sons is studying it and another has made it part of his (portfolio) career. We found a lot of things to think about in the galleries, but one installation particularly caught our eyes. 

Presented as part of the museum’s Visual Natures exhibition, Earth Bits is a fascinating collaboration between climate scientists, designers, technologists and artists that seeks to communicate the scale of climate change. 

In a huge room with massive video screens, images of the earth are overlaid with satellite imagery and data showing wind patterns, global temperature change and ice sheet melt over time. It’s a compelling and inarguable illustration of the correlation between rising emissions and the increased prevalence of disasters such as forest fires, droughts and floods.

I was convinced of the need to act on climate change anyway, but nothing I or my sons had seen previously had made the case so directly and persuasively – or so creatively.  

I found it to be a striking example of how design can be used to communicate and educate on complex subjects, and, beyond that, to connect emotionally and instil a feeling. It made me think more about the vital role of design and creativity in our industry. 

Challengers

Brand strategist and author Bernadette Jiwa’s statement that "whoever gets closer to the customer wins" has become a central tenet for software developers – and visual design is a huge piece of the puzzle. A good example is in the consumer banking sector, where app-based challenger banks such as Monzo are taking market share with design-led approaches that align with the needs and aspirations of their customers.  

On its launch, Monzo’s bright coral cards stood out dramatically against the business-like grey and navy of the incumbents, speaking to its disruptive intent. In its young and tech-savvy target market, a Monzo card became almost a status symbol. 

Monzo’s streamlined app quickly made others feel dated. Compared with traditional banking apps, which are awash with features but much more functional in their design, Monzo’s app is vastly easier and more pleasurable to navigate, and generates a much stronger emotional connection. Simple features such as the ‘round-up’ savings function and the ability to create pots for different purposes meet previously challenging user needs in a frictionless way. 

Good design is still too often an afterthought.

In recent conversations, I have noticed that advice businesses have become more concerned about new entrants to the market. A 2021 Dynamic Planner survey backed up this anecdotal experience, with larger businesses particularly likely to express this worry. This makes sense. From transport (Uber) to tourism (AirBnb), modern, design-led, app-based approaches are biting off pieces of the pie across industries. And robo-advisers have a similar goal. 

The advantage for newcomers in any market is that they do not have to service legacy customers or meet niche needs. My Monzo account does not do a fraction of the things my traditional bank account does, so I still use that one for a lot of the heavy lifting. Day to day, though? I hardly use it. 

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The threat is similar in the advice world. The incumbents are better equipped to deal with the messiness of real people’s lives. They have the data feeds for complex processes, and they have their client bases in place, with no need to lure people to whizzy new platforms. 

But the risk is that the juicy bits of the operation get creamed off. If a client receives a big bonus, for example, do they go to their adviser with that? These days it is not difficult to go online and invest £100,000. 

Advice businesses have become more concerned about new entrants to the market.

Advice businesses cannot compete on investment, so they need to lead with financial planning, which is a much more challenging piece of the pie for tech-driven newcomers to steal. That means building great relationships – and great design has an important role to play. 

Thinking about how clients feel and using every touchpoint to make them feel good about you and the service you are providing is a powerful way to cement and elevate the client relationship.

In a hybrid world, where most advisers are dealing with clients both face-to-face and through online interactions and tools, that is about people skills, of course, but it is also about design that goes beyond the merely functional to connect on an emotional level. 

Good design is still too often an afterthought. People build something and then think about how to make it look pretty. But the exhibition we saw in Lisbon – and the success of beautifully designed apps across industries – is a reminder of what can be achieved when you put design at the core.

Ben Goss is chief executive of Dynamic Planner