Branding. Done.
Dawn Creative goes through all elements of branding, from the basics through to the real nitty-gritty.
Each episode, we host a new guest, to speak about how different areas of branding have impacted their role, their business, and the projects they have worked on.
We'll speak to MD's, marketing managers, creatives, and people across various businesses to get a variety of viewpoints on why branding, and all the elements within it, are so important.
Branding. Done.
UX and UI Design with Barclays' Kyle Cassidy
Ever wonder how design decisions are made in the world of finance? Our guest for today, Kyle Cassidy, a Senior UX Design Manager at Barclays Bank, is here to peel back the curtain. Discover how his journey, starting from a Degree in Business Management and Entrepreneurship to a pivotal role in a leading bank, has shaped his perspective on UX/UI design.
Join us as we dissect the role of data patterns, tracking specifications, and research in making informed, evidence-based design decisions. Kyle shares rich insights about the principles of 'Don't Make Me Think' and its significance in creating a positive user experience. This episode is a deep-dive into the nuances of designing for diverse-user groups and how the challenges of satisfying both young and old users can influence design strategies.
In the ever-evolving world of UX/UI design, we look at the future. Hear Kyle's thoughts on emerging technologies like AI, VR, and AR, and how they may shape the industry. Learn about the importance of setting success metrics and adapting to change in an industry that sees constant evolution. We also delve into the intricacies of regulatory compliance and how it can affect design systems in the banking sector. A must-listen for anyone keen on understanding the dynamic world of UX/UI design, the role of data, and the future of this industry.
Okay, right, that's up and running. Hi, kyle, first time we've ever met. It's always exciting. Some people on the podcast I've known before, but this will be completely new, new conversation. Really excited to hear what you've got to say For the benefit of people tuning in having to listen to us both have a chat about this particular topic. Do you want to give me a little bit of an intro to you and your role briefly, and what it covers?
Speaker 2:Sure perfect. First off, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me on. So my name is Kyle Cassidy. I'm a senior UX design manager at Barclays Bank currently. It's quite a varied role, to be honest. It tends to vary between design leads and leading on design projects, which is everything from scoping a project in its early phases and thinking about the research and design we need to go through right through to getting Nitty Gritty in the hands-on and executing the design, as well as supporting younger members of the team and helping their growth and personal development. So it's a really varied role. It's quite enjoyable and I get involved in all different aspects of the process, like I say, from early discovery right through to getting hands-on in the design and even develop a handover.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, you mentioned team there, kind of scalar team. How many numbers roughly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in our team there's about 20, but across Barclays there's pockets of different design teams that focus on different areas. We're one of the design teams which pick up briefs from different areas of the bank. Other design teams work in a pod model, so they work specifically on different areas of financial products and services, so they might specialize, say, in borrowing mortgages, that kind of thing. We're not as focused and not as specialized, which means we pick up briefs from various different areas of the bank depending on the nature of the brief that comes in.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're overseeing more the kind of footprint and digital presence of Barclays in places and some people are honing in on a particular space to kind of make sure that performs at its best.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, totally. So we don't have a specific focus area. We can pick up briefs from various different areas across the bank, depending on what's needed. Sometimes we can compliment pods who need extra people, so we'll put people into those pods to help them out. Other times it could be that we own the brief, so a brief will come into our team and we'll execute it within our team.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so I'm old enough 47 in a couple of weeks to remember no websites, no digital comms at all. Yeah, when we designed when I was back in 2020, 21 years old, it was very much designed for print. So you're obviously in this space and people are more familiar with it. Clearly. But what's your kind of backstory? How did you get to that point and then into a kind of an issue?
Speaker 1:I know you say you weren't quite growing this far, but it's still a very, it's very much a specialism, isn't it as well? Do you want to give us a bit of a flavour as to how you kind of got on that journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I think the beauty of this is everyone's story is slightly different and I think for the younger people coming into the industry, I didn't even know this was an industry when I started. So I did my degree in business management and entrepreneurship and I thought I wanted to go into marketing. I graduated university in the middle of the financial crisis. There wasn't a lot about where I was jobs-wise, so I moved away from where I lived. I moved into a small online educational company called Key Stages Online Really good, family-run business and they needed someone as a graduate to come in and help out with their marketing. So I moved in, helped out with the marketing and then they had a big project going on internally which was about repositioning their website onto a content management system, which involved a redesign.
Speaker 2:So I got involved very early on in lots of different things from analytics tagging up the website, seeing who's using what, into looking at paper-click marketing and thinking about how they can use the budgets and how they can learn to learn in around how search engines worked.
Speaker 2:So it was a really good opportunity for me going into a small business because I was given a lot of time to focus on my own personal development, go and learn things and have the freedom to try things out, which was a great opportunity to be in, because they sort of supported me and if I didn't get it right, it was fine. I had that sort of freedom and support network around me. So I was there for about a year and a half. Obviously, it was very digitally focused because the education which the children received was all online. I learned about content management systems because the project there was to reposition the website onto a content management system and then from there I moved into Phones for you which, yeah, I was going to do the hand signal down which people wouldn't see on the audio.
Speaker 2:The madness about moving to Phones for you is, I'd just gone from a small online educational company to what, in my eyes, was a big, established, well-known retailer, and they didn't have a content management system power in the website, which was mind-boggling to me, having just come from this small business. So from there I initially went in and I was looking after pulling together this very small change requests and briefing it into an offshore development team so I'd make sure that they've got everything they need in the brief. So if we're building a landing page, have they got all the assets? Have they got all of the meta information? Have they got all the Facebook tracking pixels, etc. And then from there again, I was quite lucky in the fact that I had really good senior managers, so they put me on training courses with human factors, started reading books around don't make me think communicating the user experience, design of everyday things. And then it was from there that I really started to focus on UX and design as a pure specialism, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:And then after that, I've all moved since then.
Speaker 1:if you want to know about those, yeah, no, I mean, it's an interesting backstory, isn't it? Because you know, as I mentioned, I remember it being pretty much print at some point and it's a huge expansion of communication or design or digital needs and things like that, where it's so broad now that you actually do get to a point where you have really really specific specialisms in a particular space. During the conversation there you mentioned marketing a couple of times and you know your responsibilities earlier in your career might have been more marketing focused. Where do you see you X in UI, in the marketing realm and within Barclays? How influential is marketing working with you or vice versa?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So I suppose I look at skill sets. I come across an analogy called a broken comb, and that's very much how I am like. I've got very deep specialisms in certain areas, and other areas I've got very shallow skills so I can be involved in a conversation, but if you asked me to execute it, I couldn't go and execute it. Analytics and marketing is something which is quite a strong skill of mine. So when I look at a design and experience, I'm always thinking about right, how do we measure it? How is the current experience working? What are we trying to solve? How do we know something isn't working? So you can put me in a tool like Google Analytics. I can analyse it for you. I can set up tracking for a particular project as well. So I'm very data focused and data driven in what I do At Barclays at the minute. It's a separate specialism, so I kind of skipped out.
Speaker 2:Before this, I worked at a digital agency and I was there for seven years. Again, I did a lot of things at that agency and one of the things which I did do was the analytics side of it. So, moving into Barclays, we don't get involved in the analytics side of it anymore. So, like we don't write the tagging specifications, we don't do the data analysis. We've got specialist teams that do that.
Speaker 2:So if we're working on a particular project, we can liaise with them. If we're in discovery, to understand, right, what are the pain points where people dropping off in the experience, what is the device usage today? What browsers are people using? Rather than me going to have to find it myself, then from there we can understand the existing experience. When a new experience is going live during the design period, we'll do tagging specifications. So there we'll liaise with the analytics team. They'll do the tagging specifications and tagging implementation and then, after something's gone live, it's just about measuring the KPIs which we've tagged up. So is that particular project meeting the KPIs which we set out at the start?
Speaker 1:Okay, and then it who, I say, wins the battle? Because everyone's always got an opinion when it comes to, maybe, design or layout. But as we get into the digital space that you could argue, there's a few rules around it and you say, well, actually, you know, if I do this or a change the shape of the button, or a higher up the page or simple stuff, it actually makes a big difference. Yeah, but as we all know, other people that are maybe not in that space, from a different department sales or someone else partly involved, have an opinion. How do you deal with, like those situations where it might be someone of a higher order, you know, higher ranked in the company, demanding that something is seen in a certain way, but you can kind of prove that that suggestion isn't going to work and we're not going to implement it.
Speaker 2:It's a great question, this Research which we can apply to that situation to try and convince from make it less about opinions and more about. Okay, let's use a good example. So F shaped scan patterns, for example. We're talking about where to place a button. Often you find that the person that is saying right, the button needs to be there. They don't understand F shaped patterns. They don't understand how people scan a page. They don't understand how that F shaped pattern, if you place an image, that image will draw focal attention. So I think it's from my perspective.
Speaker 2:It's always about Trying to back up the reason why you've done something through the design decision to educate them on this is the thought process, but then also back it up with data as well. So, okay, we've done this before in this project. This is how it tested, or this is the common pattern that we're using in this particular scenario. It's never an easy one, and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but as long as people can understand your thought process, I think that's the most important thing. Yeah, a lot of times we used to say phones, for you will test it, but you can't ultimately test everything all the time. Sometimes there has to be okay. Now we're doing it this way for this reason, yeah, but yeah, if you can test things, that's always a great thing to do as well. Just do an MVT test on it or an AB test on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an interesting space, isn't it? Because you find that in kind of creative or design space, everyone's got an opinion and you could have loads of experience. I'm in the 26 year. He can tell by my grey hair, which people can't see, luckily, on the call. But even then people will still go. I know, but can you go? But no, I'm honestly, I'm telling you Make the logo bigger, yeah. Well, yeah, I'm going to write a book called make the logo bigger when I retire.
Speaker 1:But yeah, things like that, where sometimes 9 plus 9 is 18 and that's it. Someone starts saying, well, can we make it 16? Though you go? No, no, the answer is it is what it is and sometimes in that, in design space, people don't like that, but there is when it gets into digital and testing and UX and UI, you can get to a point where you go I think we're pretty much there. You know, can we squeeze another percent? With a bit more testing, possibly, but you already know that some things work and some things don't, don't you? So it becomes a bit more black and white. Like you say, it's evidence, isn't it data, proof, points what we've done before. You know, kind of put your case forward. So, with that in mind, ux UI what, why is it important? What, why? Why would you say it's important if you're trying to, you know, protect your corner and give weight to the industry? What, why? Why is it important to people?
Speaker 2:Why is it important? And essentially, if you want somebody to do something, you make it as easy as possible for them to do that thing right and the book don't make me think that I think that says it all. And yeah, it's, I think, especially today. To attract somebody to a website, if they're coming by PPC add, you're paying money for them to be there, and if it is that you want them to convert, so sign up to, say, an email subscription or buy something from a store you need to make that interaction as simple as possible to make sure that you are getting value and return for what you're paying to get someone there in the first place. Now, that's a very e-commerce marketing driven example, but every website out there is aimed to do something, so you just have to make it as easy as possible for users to do that thing when you arrive there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I don't know. Sometimes I feel like it gets over, overly complicated in this particular space, because you wouldn't want seven doors before you get into a retail space, would you know? No, no no one said that's a good idea.
Speaker 2:It's quite a funny one. So when I met my wife, she didn't understand what you actually knew I was and she couldn't explain what I do. But now she'll use something and then she'll go. This is a terrible experience like this should work like this. So, yeah, sometimes it's difficult to explain what you do as a UX UI designer, but people can always talk to you about problems they haven't used in something and then, through speaking to them about that, they understand what UX and UI design is and why it's important.
Speaker 1:Do you think, as our industry has advanced, do you think maybe we're guilty of maybe too many acrimonyms? Should I say UI, ux, over-complicating things and actually trying to make it sound more clever than maybe what it is? I mean, obviously it is thought through, but do you think we're maybe making it more difficult people to engage and understand?
Speaker 2:I've got two very different takes on this. I think UX and UI. When I came into the industry and I think you mentioned it earlier they kind of were two very different specialisms because a lot of UI designers were just focused on how things looked in the browser and they were coming at it from a print background, whereas the UX designers were more around like, hey, the research, let's look at, say, hierarchy, card sorting, taxonomy, let's do some user testing, and they would have skills doing that. What I've seen through my career is, as I've progressed, you've had more of the traditional pure play. Ui designers learn about UX and then class themselves as hybrids and I think the lines now when you say UX, UI design, it's really blurred what you're looking at in a person. So I would class myself as a UX UI designer.
Speaker 2:Ui definitely isn't one of my strong skills, it's more of one of my shallow skills. But I can do everything else across the process, from the research, the discovery, the setting up a design team and delivering against design, against a project timeline. I can do AB testing, tagging, specifications. I think it's just. There's so many things you have to do now to be a UX UI designer. I think it can become complicated. I don't think that goes back to your original question there, which was are we making it more complicated by acronyms? I think we are in some cases as well, because we seem to change the words, what we use, to mean the same thing. So, like design systems wasn't a thing going back to, say, 10 years or so, but we were still talking about atomic design principles back then, but the word design system hadn't really been coined yet. So yeah, terminology tends to change quite a little bit as you move throughout your career.
Speaker 1:I think every industry is guilty of it. I think it was a time where we weren't so guilty of it because maybe it was more simple, and then we've become guilty. Finance itself is guilty of using language that is misunderstood and you probably could simplify it down so most people get it. Which leads me to another question in this space. If you go back to the simple days when I first started and the things were printed, you had pretty much two choices you could start from the front and read through to the back, or you could flick from the back to the front. You could obviously dive in the middle, but most people didn't Anything.
Speaker 1:Digital. You can come in at any angle, any level. It's way more complex, but we're still then having to deliver something that needs to work for most generations. So in the banking space you can have an account from the age of one. Obviously, you don't really operate it at that point, but it will be a time in your teens and through all the way through to your life. Now my mum needs to deal with digital stuff. She's 74. How do you deal with that mass expanse of people that are born digital? My two kids are 10 and 7, can operate all the way around an iPad and works the foul. My mum's not too bad but will struggle. How's that kind of influential decision making day to day and how do you combat those massive differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a challenge, isn't it, to be perfectly honest. So I think a traditional bank like Barclays struggles with this a little bit more. So, like your digital adopters into the space, or digital disruptors sorry, like you, monzos and your Starlings they're acquiring customers as fresh rights. So generally, you would expect them to have a slightly younger demographic and more digitally savvy Somebody like Barclays who's been around for a long time. They've obviously got more of their older generation customers that have been used to going into branches, having appointments with bank managers, doing everything face to face in the branch, and that has obviously changed.
Speaker 2:Covid had a big, big part to play in this. So I think one thing COVID did was it basically put more emphasis on businesses to think about digital alternatives to those physical experiences, and there was a big upscale needed to happen amongst that demographic which would have been used to going into branch. I think, fortunately, we had a lot of technology in place, such as virtual appointments, so things like Zoom Teams etc. They all existed, so naturally, those were the solutions which we used to provide these digital alternatives for people needing help to engage with the bank digitally.
Speaker 2:On my second point, I would say that when we are ever doing a project, we will always do usability testing as part of what we are designing and we'll try and make sure that we've got a mixed demographic in there. So sometimes we'll see when we take something into testing, it tests really well with some people. The worst ones are obviously when you take something to usability testing it tests really poorly. But they're the sessions which you learn the most from, so you can go okay, it seems like the younger demographic are getting this, but it seems like the older demographic are struggling with this particular aspect. So how can we solve for that a little bit better? But it's definitely a challenge to try and make something that works for all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm assuming simplification is key, like it is in a lot of design, really, isn't it? It's trying to strip back the layers. Still get something to work. I think when people see simple things, you know whether that's a piece of cutlery or something as complex as a web page. They clearly like it and think that must be easy. But actually it's probably the hardest thing to do is to get to a simple, a really simple solution and it still work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, totally. I think the one which I like the most that's been done recently is the sharing the Wi-Fi code which I will introduce is the most simple bit of user experience ever, but it just solves the frustration of have you got the Wi-Fi password? Yes, I have. It's this 24 digit code. It's uppercase, it's lowercase, it's numbers, whereas now it's someone's connected to the Wi-Fi share password. Bang, they're on and it's like why did somebody not think of that sooner?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, there's a few things like Netflix logins with the QR code if you get logged out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 1:And just really nice stuff. Yeah, and the Wi-Fi code is interesting because a few years back we had our nephew who had from North Wales stay over for a couple of nights because he was training in Manchester and he opened the front door, not seeing him for about three months. He went Hi, dave, you okay, I went. Yeah, fine, he went. What's the Wi-Fi code? I'm like, all right, okay.
Speaker 1:The second thing he's saying to me is straight onto the internet. So it's obviously critical. He's like you think he's 23 now, but he's probably 21 at the time. So the most important thing in the world to those guys you mentioned when you were talking about different age brackets and things like that and people going into branch obviously branches are shrinking, closing down. There's talk about like banking hubs maybe, where four or five get together in a particular space, which I think sounds quite a good idea, really a little bit like car dealerships all gathering together in one space, with the personal touch obviously disappearing. Same for a lot of businesses, not just the banking sector. How do you try and replicate that through tech so people feel that they're being spoken to and maybe their arms are being wrapped around them a little bit or being guided. How does. Like you know, some of that is tone of voice and language. But how do you find that job, those types of discussions, you know, when you're designing things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's not really come up on the projects that I'm working on at the minute, but there is legislation within the industry called consumer duty and it's all around treating customers fairly and it's around giving them other alternatives and avenues which aren't like just digital, and it's about realising when customers are vulnerable.
Speaker 2:So this isn't a particular Barclays example, but this is something that I was looking at the other day and it was about the gambling sector and about understanding when customers are perhaps gambling too much above the means and trying to interrupt them before it goes too far to say look, actually we think we need to have a conversation. We've put like a temporary block on your account. So for me, it's basically it's personalisation triggers to try and help promote good behaviours or understand what customers need at what particular moment in time. That's really hard to do on scale, but I think that's how we can try and help customers a little bit better when it comes to digital interfaces Try and understand the emotional context, which is a little bit more, trying to understand why they're coming, and try and put in front of them what they need as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:So within this ever-evolving world, we're talking about different age brackets there and obviously having to make sure that everyone can get involved, because money in itself and access to money and nowhere you're at with your bills or your accounts and things like is critical and very important to people. Ux and UI design can obviously help that journey. Hopefully it's a little bit of stress as well. If it's been really well designed. The odd little personal touch would be good as well. It feels more human, which a lot of us need as well. How do you ultimately measure the success of the UX design? It's a never-ending thing. You can push a page and push a page and push a page to a point of going not sure we can get anything better and it might survive for a while, but then the world around us might change, might not, so it kind of go again. How do you try and measure success? To say, yeah, we're in a good space now and this is working.
Speaker 2:So I think it all depends on what it is that we're trying to achieve. So we work on projects which are customer facing. We work on projects which are more colleague facing. We work on projects which are basically, it's not end customer, but it's like B to B to C, so to speak. So every good project should start with conversations around what does success look like, what are we trying to measure and what are we trying to achieve? And then, as a project goes live, it's about measuring back against those metrics, the metrics which we measure.
Speaker 2:For me, it's not about just measuring the quant metrics. So we shouldn't just be measuring conversion rate. We shouldn't just be measuring time on page. Time on page is one of my favorite ones, because what value does that create for anybody the longer someone spends on a page, unless you're a social network and you're being paid via ad revenue? We have been in some conversations where stakeholders are like, oh, we need to keep people on the page longer. It's like, no, we need to help them achieve what they've come to do quicker, not keep them on a page.
Speaker 2:So there's some education, I think, early on in every project and I saw this more in an agency around what does success look like and what metrics should we be measuring?
Speaker 2:And trying to get rid of some of those myths around silly metrics like time on page. So get those nailed down in terms of the metrics of how we measure success. But then, after something goes live, measure not only the quant but also the qual. So check back in with the people that you released it for, let them to test the new experience, see how they are finding it, having lived with it, and then see if they've got any ideas of how things could be improved further, because no good product is ever finished right, because everything is changing around us. We might release something today and it's industry standard, industry leading, but then the competitors might release something a year later and then, all of a sudden, our experience now isn't good enough anymore. So for me, it's about measuring against what you try to achieve when you set out, but trying to balance that quant and qual. So you're trying to build up the full picture of, yes, it's performing against the metrics which ultimately the senior stakeholders want to see, but this is how customers think and feel about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, you're in a space that's massively changed. I often use the banking sector as a reference for like evolution, because if you think back to the day, most banks would have tried to pick a concrete building with four pillars outside it and a safe in the basement and your money was secure. And all that time and everyone had dark colors navy, blue, black and white. And then the main banks like Barclays, Nat West, people like that. The color palette has changed over time. It's brightened and then it's obviously gone slowly into digital, then faster into digital, and then the Barclays branches look like a nice hotel lobby. People walk over to you with iPads. Now I remember for me they felt like the first company where they brought the little calculator pin pad out and logging with that, and they always seemed like they were innovating.
Speaker 1:I've probably not mentioned today. I've been a Barclays customer for 46 years, would you believe it? So my mum set up an account. I still waiting for my 50-pound bonus reward for being so loyal, but it's not coming soon. Hopefully someone from Barclays is listening in. But within an industry like this it is a finance industry, highly regulated. I've done work for finance companies in the past and if it was printed literature, in terms of conditions, you have to adhere to at least a decent enough point size that people would get that across, and that's becoming more. Rules applied to that over time. Whether that's your gas bill or your electric bill, clarity, single bills How's that working? Ux and UI design you can have a hell of a lot of content, aren't you, that you've got to put in Because it's how do you kind of do that? Have you got set rules that you try and follow, whether that's point size and things like that or accessibility?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've got quite a few points in this. I'll try and explain it as succinctly as possible. So Project I'd recently worked on it was a regulatory and compliance piece, so it was around providing better transparency of product fees that someone had paid Within the business context and basically letting customers know that they may get better rates if there was a shop around. Now the template which we had to put the data into was given to us by the regulator, but the regulator being the regulator, had given us a print table layout, a very complicated print table layout, not thinking about how that table layout works responsibly in a digital context.
Speaker 2:So in that particular scenario I joined the project quite late on, to be honest, where work had already gone on with another designer and an accessibility consultant to look at how we get close to achieving the layout and adhering to what the regulator wants while still staying close to our design system. So at Barclays we've got a design system which we use to design our digital products and services. It's set up in Figma and it's also in Storybook, so the developers will pick up that when they're doing the development work as well. So the exercise there was to look at what that template is, figure out how close we can get to that template using Blueprint, put that together and then basically send that back to say we've had to change the template in these particular ways for, say, accessibility, compliance perspective or a Blueprint perspective. So Blueprint sorry is the name of our design system.
Speaker 2:So in that sometimes it's a bit of a challenge. So we stay close as obviously possible. We come to what the regulator is asking for. If not, we'll get fined, but we are trying to achieve what we are trying to achieve based on our own internal standards.
Speaker 2:So accessibility looked at that template and said hang on a second, this section's missing a title. So if someone's using a screen reader, they need to see a title before they get to that section because they need context of what that section is. We need to look at it responsibly. So even for non-visually impaired users, we need to make sure, if they're looking at it on the web mobile view, that that content has been scaled down proportionately so obviously fit on the screen nicely. So that went through a few iterations with product owners, with legal and compliance with Blueprint in terms of the design system team and with accessibility, ensuring that we were keeping factors in mind such as you mentioned, their point size. So making sure if we've got, say, a bullet point list of terms at the bottom of that layout, it's no smaller than, say, 16 points on a desktop device so people can actually read it and it's not like we've put it in size 8 font which someone's going to be quite a struggle to read.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just even that in itself, the information that's fed into you from the regulatory body in a table, because that might fit on an A4 landscape piece of paper it does?
Speaker 2:yeah, it did not, though.
Speaker 1:It doesn't work in the modern world, does it? And it still has to be. Really, how many people are still living in a world of print and then expect it just to automatically work online? And we all know we've got to get down to some really small screen sizes as well. Plus, then you've got to get approval from a regulatory body as well. But even just that path that you just took us all through hopefully anyone listening if people are in marketing and stuff like that, they should get a gist of this. Anyone on the fringe of it might start to realize the complexities and the levels required to test anything. Your world is heightened by needing to test things and approve things more than maybe other industries, but it's a long, long process, isn't it so to get to it oh, totally, totally.
Speaker 2:And then in that particular project it was fun because there was a lot of percentages and there was a lot of decimal values within the table and the example was always to two decimal places. But then they're coming back and going hang on, but this could be six decimal places and then I'm going OK, that's going to break things. So it wasn't like a clear path. There was lots of back and forth between different departments to look at OK, what can we change? Are we moving too far away? We need to pull this back. This won't work because of this reason. So, yeah, there was lots of back and forth on that one to try and make sure that everyone was happy and in alignment. We were still staying close to what we needed to do, but we were comfortable with it from, say, an accessibility and a design point of view.
Speaker 1:So design is important after all.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally so. Ux obviously is, I say, relative. If you look in the Gram Schema, things in the creative space, advertising space, that type of space which you know has been prevalent for years and years and years. Ux UI, you could argue, is quite new to the game. But then there's other things on the horizon, or here now really, but AI, vr, ar, things like that. Do you think any of that is going to impact anything in your role as well? From you know, ux UI obviously, across all of these things. How far off do you think some of that is creeping into your world, whether that's in the banking sector or future roles? You've got your eye on that.
Speaker 2:In our particular team, I would say no, because we are very much like project driven, so the project comes in and we meet the project brief, like we're not given a lot of space to go and explore say what? How might we? So how might we make this experience work on, say, a VR headset? Areas of the bank might be exploring it, but I'm not privy to that so I couldn't comment From my own personal experience. It was interesting because earlier we mentioned around we changed the words and language a lot to make things more confusing and something like VR. I remember being when I was working at Phones for you probably 2007-ish Google Glass.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So this technology has been around for an awfully long time, but it's not yet actually made its way into an experience which has been commercialized an awful lot. Now I think that will change an awful lot. Sorry, I want to say that I mean outside of gaming. So you have got things like Oculus Rift headsets and that within the gaming space, but within, like the context of I'm going to put a VR headset on to go and browse the internet, or, after I don't know, a new pair of night trainers, so I want to go on to a commerce shop and explore products in a VR environment. It still feels to me like we're quite some way off. That Apple have got the VR headset which they've got coming out, which is extremely expensive. It seems like it's a bit of a gamble because it's not about creating the technology for people to go and consume that experience. It's about the businesses put in that experience out there so it can be consumed on that device, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:So I mean the experiences have to be there first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we're very good at inventing loads of things, aren't we? And then sometimes we kind of get carried away with ourselves and trying to apply it to everything, and in some cases it's not appropriate, is it, you know, in the banking space? I'm sure some of it may get influenced at some point, but it doesn't seem the kind of thing that I'd be putting on to check my current account on my app, unless, of course, the VR shows a load more zeros on my current account and that becomes a reality. Then I'd be quite happy about it.
Speaker 2:But even if we talk about, say, like a non consumer perspective. So I think in the Apple demo, when they demoed their VR headset, they give an example of joining a meeting room with a VR headset on which you're like, okay. So this is a bit of a problem now because all now as businesses we're operating in this hybrid environment where you're either at home or you're in the office. But even when they demoed that technology, it was putting like a little meme ogee of you in a room and it's like come on, surely that's no better than joining a call, like we are now where we can see each other and we're talking to each other. So some of it still feels like very much in its infancy and we're trying to figure it out, like what the technology can do. And another good example is I'm wearing an Apple watch and I paid a lot of money for it. Really, the features are used for its fitness, which my old Fitbit used to do. Everything else is an app on this device I very, very rarely use, if at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, probably the same for a lot of things, isn't it? I think, people's iPhones you probably use about 10% of what it can do.
Speaker 1:You don't know the rest of it. So it's brilliant insight into what you do and this particular space, and hopefully it's give people a bit of clarity about the importance of it, but also the complexity of it as well, and across all industries, but particularly in the financial space. Just one more final thing to ask you. It's the most important question of the day. I'm going to put you under some pressure here. You're ready for this, like a lot of people, come on the podcast. I'll have a little rummage around LinkedIn to see, especially if I don't know them, familiarize themselves with them, and you list a few things that you specialist at, and the final one is dab jokes.
Speaker 2:Oh, dad jokes, Can't we all? You're on the spot here.
Speaker 1:Can you hit us with a dab joke to finish, and if not, we'll record it later and we'll add it in at the end.
Speaker 2:Oh God, dad joke. See, I have got loads, but I'm trying to filter down to appropriate on an audio recording. Oh yeah, I've got one for you. So, what do you call a chicken looking at a lettuce?
Speaker 1:Don't know.
Speaker 2:Chicken Caesar salad.
Speaker 1:Oh, brilliant, there we go. I'll put that to my 10 and seven year old in a bit. See what they make of it. I've got one actually Go on.
Speaker 2:How do you find Will Smith in the snow? Look for the fresh prince.
Speaker 1:Like that one, that one wins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that one's definitely better.
Speaker 1:There you go. You got into your swing after a few seconds, so I think I think next time we'll do a 35 minute stand up.
Speaker 2:That's all right Some whale fat.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Kyle. Thanks a lot for joining us. Some really good insights into what you do and the importance of design in the digital space. Clearly, yeah, really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:No problem, Cheers Dave.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, nice to meet you. Thanks a lot.
