Creating elegant and enduring structures for unstructured problems – that is design:
Within the labyrinth of customer experience, design emerges as the guiding light, illuminating pathways to unparalleled engagement and loyalty. Yet, for BFSI companies, navigating this labyrinth demands not only vision but also the courage to reimagine possibilities, transforming challenges into opportunities for connection and growth.
Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Head of Design at CRED, says that a successful design must accomplish three things: attract attention, drive usage, and retain the user. Our guiding principle is to attract people with a compelling narrative, drive usage by thoughtfully crafting the experience, and retain the user by helping them succeed in their goals by making them successful in what they set out to achieve.
He delves deeper: “At each of these steps, there are multiple choices that can be made. Is the narrative about beauty or intrigue? What will make the experience smooth and fulfilling? The most challenging element of design is disambiguating these principles to ensure that all three elements are satisfied in order to solve the specific problem at hand.”
Perfect Tone & Colours
One of the principles at CRED is to design for a person, not a problem. The reason is that problems don’t need solutions, humans do. Design involves understanding triggers and how they impact human emotions and behavior.
Haresh describes 3 types of triggers: “The first type of trigger is physically perceptible – words, colours, sounds, tones. The second is the emotional trigger – language that evokes a particular belief – trust, fear, calmness, etc. The third is haptic triggers for those with different abilities.”
Further CRED operates based on an understanding of how people perceive and respond to various triggers. Design plays a crucial role in making choices, whether it is related to light, sound, colour, or messaging, to evoke specific emotions and elicit desired responses, ultimately shaping a particular experience.
Recently, CRED announced a design update for its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) experience. The update will offer several new features and rewards for every transaction. Additionally, CRED is also offering limited-time luxury drops across select locations in India.
The highlight of the update is a new rhodium-inspired visual design for the UPI interface. The design will feature a silver skin that interacts with the environment, changing colors accordingly. Additionally, an aura will glow while scanning QR codes, and users will receive jade, rose gold, and rhodium medallions upon completing transactions.
Personalization Unlocks Loyalty
Personalization is about understanding a specific individual’s needs and context, and solving problems in a way that accounts for these. Understanding of needs and knowledge of this context comes from continued observation of human behaviour in general, how customers interact with a product, their responses, actions or lack of it, and more. With these heuristics we can identify the range of problems to solve and create a set of approaches that address them thoughtfully.
One problem that CRED set out to solve was people fearful of missing their credit card due dates and the anxiety around it, which creates negative associations with credit. “We solved this by offering members the option of allowing us to scan their statements, identify due date, and remind them at the right time so that they wouldn’t need to spend mental bandwidth on credit card payments anymore. This is an example of personalization at scale,” explains Harish.
Talent & Design Thinking
Could there be differences of opinion between technology and business experts regarding the roadmap for CX improvement to get the differences resolved? Harish shares: “The talent density at CRED is such that we have teams and leaders who are the best in their areas of specialisation, with deep experience and strong opinions. Clarity on the problem to solve and the people to solve them for, makes it simple to align on the right decision.”
Design Thinking: Creating Enduring Structures
Design is the straightforward pursuit of creating elegant and enduring structures for unstructured problems. Human life consists of tasks that occur sequentially or in parallel. Without structure, companies end up making suboptimal choices in sequencing and parallelization.
As per Harish, design is about abstracting and organizing tasks into a structure that solves the problem. As mentioned earlier, a successful design has to attract attention, drive usage, and retain the user. By organizing and sequencing tasks into these elements of the customer experience, design can create structure for the people whose problems we intend to solve. Sometimes, this process is called design thinking.
Read more:
Ecofy: Significant plans for Generative AI & RPA