As user experience (UX) architect for Iress, Nick Elliott helps our teams understand what our users and clients are trying to achieve, what’s getting in the way and where we can help build, test and learn faster.
Technology is always changing. How does user experience or UX help our clients stay ahead?
There’s always a huge appetite in the business world to look for better, more efficient ways to do things and so innovation needs to be part of our daily lives. That’s how businesses gain an advantage, and where we try to help.
UX is really about putting people in the middle of the design process. It’s a little about designing software that looks good. Mostly it’s about understanding what motivates people, being empathetic to this and designing something that’s going to make a difference, and be pleasurable to use.
How is Iress Labs helping us with software design?
One of the reasons we introduced Iress Labs was to design alongside our clients and users. If we’re not talking to them about what they want, and understanding what they’re trying to do, we’re really just guessing. That’s not going to get us, or them, anywhere. We want to build software that helps our clients and users become more efficient, and allows them to focus on what's important. Iress Labs is currently available in Xplan and will be available in more of our software later this year.
We want to lead the way, not be reacting. One of the goals of user engagement through research is to not only understand our user better, but what tools they currently use and see if we can make that more efficient and less fragmented.
What’s on the horizon?
One of the many emerging technologies we’re looking at is voice and experimenting with ways it can really make an impact in our applications. Can it help to speed up navigation in our products? Can we help improve how you manage your day by allowing use of voice applications from within your car? Can we help your digital journey towards a paperless experience? Can we remove the need for manual data entry in our software?
UX at Iress is about finding answers to these types of questions as quickly as possible.
Sounds exciting. What else are you focused on?
We are experimenting more and will learn faster. More engagement with clients and users will help us make improvements that ensure we’re delivering the right things at the right time.
We are a business whose products reach many parts of financial services. There’s continuous research and testing going on to help us take a step back and look and understand the whole journey of our software and how it all interacts so it is lined up and connected.
The end result of good UX should be better business performance and ultimately a better customer experience. That’s really what we’re trying to achieve.
