Time is Money: Managing Financial Clients, Aras Bilgen

I’m sharing notes from UX Scotland 2014, which took place in Edinburgh Thursday and Friday this week.

Aras Bilgen drew on his experience in a consultancy for financial services to share what he’s learnt when it comes to being a UXer dealing with financial services. He mapped the organisation as an onion layer from the frontline to the background stakeholders.

Some key points included:

• The home front are your key to help, align with their interests as they’ll also be able to help you with some other departments
• Don’t be afraid to challenge executives as they need to be engaged. They are likely to fall into one of two types: micromanaging or interested but busy. Because they are so important, never delegate who speaks and presents to them!
• IT have far bigger issues such as security to deal with: it’s best to talk about user benefit vs risk
• Legal are important in finance: run things past them early and either ask for approval or options as to what should be changed (options give you means to still make changes)
• Marketing are going to have to work with the content you create: “don’t leave them garbage”
• Other vendors can be allies or non-allies: if allies understand how to work with each other, if not allies (with the financial company) don’t take it on yourself to patch things up but just ensure that roles are clearly delineated.
• Branding isn’t as important in finance as it is in some other fields, but is still something to be aware of.