17. 1717
2,000 years to think of new edge cases
Ability to schedule a payment to be sent from Hawaii to Tokyo on a Friday
afternoon at year’s end. The originating payment is in $. The payment is to
be delivered in ¥. The originator has a 10 hour contracted FX rate.
I would like only the passionate Experience professionals to smile for a quick photo.
Quick warning – be careful when suggesting a silly topic name to the great folks at MadPow for one of their events.
As you can see, I made a silly joke about a “bar”…
And got the time slot right next to the bar.
When we talk about “bars” or “what great is” context is important.
At Bottomline we build B2B payment solutions. This is important because most of us here likely have different vantage points in the Financial services world. Our, Bottomline’s, place in the financial services world is that we focus on creating solutions that allow business to pay and get paid.
If I ask people across the financial space that I spend my days working on where the bar is and where we are in creating exceptional solutions in the B2B receivable and payments space, this is where most people think we are.
“We are doing great things”
“Really innovative because we now have ISO 20022”
However, this is more likely where we are.
We, in this space, are clearing “a” bar.
But it is all relative.
Regardless of what financial service industry we work in, it really is up to us as Experience leaders to have a clear view on where we really are.
I wanted to start with the various “reasons” that change the height of the bar that we encounter every day.
We can regularly agree that the bar for quality experiences has been low since there has been financial services. The height of this bar was not set with the internet.
Lets not forget about the regulatory, compliance and security gravitational pulls.
Impressively complex series of “personas”.
Our significant capacity to dream-up and focus on edge cases.
Such as….
I want to leave those other things to the side for right now to focus on how experience professional add complexity to the mix which in turn changes the height of the bar.
Lets start with how computers work.
The reason we need to start there is because it has established the journey of experiences with software. This is core to everything we have done in the software world since computing was invented.
From an experience perspective we had to work within the constraints of this paradigm.
Nearly every experience designer that I encounter that has been doing this work for 10 or more years has a burned in bias to this paradigm.
Equally or more importantly, people that use software have constructed mental model whether they realize it or not. This is especially exaggerated in the enterprise space. Professional finance people that use finance software of any type have been trained to think about and do their work aligned with core computer paradigms.
Talk about changing the height of a bar. Or maybe more accurately, not allowing the bar to change.
We as experience designers would do earth shattering things like…make the icons are more interesting looking But this not change the underlying fact that it is forcing me into its construct.
Then as we start building interaction models on top of the paradigm of how data is organized.
While this is in a GUI, it forces people to understand how to retrieve data in the paradigm of the computer.
Then we have the infamous “table” or “grid”.
When I talk to groups about this topic and show the table example, I get responses like….
But is this really where we should be focused?
Directory structure presentations?
Advanced Searches?
Tables and grids?
Are these components and elements what makes up the height of the bar?
Speaking on behalf of enterprise B2B payments, this is exactly where the focus has been.
There has been some great work making these things better.
Keeping the focus on these things is what keeps us as getting better at clearing a low bar…but as adults.