The importance of the UI framework for banking applications has increased in modern times. Customers demand a user-friendly and intuitive user interface that will be easy to navigate, respond to, and address their requirements. Banking applications have reached all corners, and customers from all segments use them for their daily transactions. The user interface framework is the cord that connects the applications and customers. As simple as a UI framework will be, customers will find an affinity for the brand.

The UI for banking applications cannot afford to change so frequently. Banking applications do periodically undergo modifications and changes. But to ensure user convenience and customer satisfaction, the banking applications cannot undergo a complete makeover. They must maintain consistency despite all updates to ensure that banks do not lose their loyal customer base.

The UI framework plays a crucial role in banking application development, but let’s understand why it is so critical.

Banks are undergoing massive digital transformation to meet changing customer preferences and industry trends. Since banking is all about customer experience, banks must validate their applications in terms of usability and user experience. The UI framework is essential to retain old customers and attract new ones. A well-designed and user-friendly UI framework delivers a positive user experience and helps to retain customers.

Banking applications are storage houses that capture and maintain sensitive customer information. An effective UI framework includes many security features that can help secure customer data and financial transactions.

Banking applications must meet all essential legal and regulatory requirements. The users who use applications like lending and payment gateways must all be thoroughly aware of the changes in legal and regulatory standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Know Your Customer (KYC), and more. The UI framework stores guidelines that users can refer to before availing of services. It saves users time from going back and forth. A robust UI framework can help meet regulatory requirements more effectively and efficiently.

The main purpose of the UI framework is its usability and accessibility. A well-designed UI framework ensures the ease of application usage and user accessibility. Users access banking applications through multiple platforms, browsers, and devices. Hence, maintaining the consistency of the user experience is essential. A well-designed UI framework aims at improving the user experience across multiple devices and operating systems.

Banking applications offer flexibility and ease of use to their users. A customized and responsive UI framework ensures consistency of use and makes the user experience much smoother, with optimum performance and reduced latency. A seamless UI framework helps with quick implementation, updates, and maintenance of applications. It also helps create a user-friendly, secure, compliant, and consistent user experience. A consistent UI framework and the user-friendly features of banking applications connect customers and service banks across multiple platforms and browsers.

Irrespective of whether the users use mobile or desktop applications, a user-friendly UI framework makes the user banking experience favourable. An advanced UI framework helps create interactive data visualization to assist customers in making well-informed financial decisions.

A well-designed and flexible UI framework can address individual requirements and preferences as well as facilitate the integration between many third-party service providers like payment gateways, financial data aggregators, regulatory authorities and more. Finally, and most importantly, a consistent UI framework helps in building and reinforcing brand authority and identity to ensure customer experience and loyalty.

Changing customer expectations, regulatory demands and growing competition have triggered a massive digital transformation in modern-age banking. There is now a need for a seamless, secure, and user-friendly digital banking experience. UI framework is one of the key ingredients to achieve the desired result and attract and retain customers.

What is the cost of consistency in a UI framework?

It is essential to maintain the uniformity of the user experience for applications across all platforms and channels. But, for banking applications, the importance of the UI framework multiplies as the main objective of the banking business is to ensure an optimum user experience.

Maintaining the uniformity of the user experience is crucial to ensure the consistency of the UI framework. It means that the application UI must not change abruptly and should not be completely different from the previous version. A consistent UI is the key to maintaining a uniform and predictable banking application user experience across all channels and platforms. However, maintaining UI framework consistency is not devoid of challenges. It also comes with a need to invest in and maintain a consistent UI framework, known as the cost of consistency.

Why maintaining the cost of consistency in a UI framework is a complex process?

The cost of consistency in a UI framework can be measured under the following parameters.

Designing the UI frame and keeping it consistent requires a little time and effort. The developers must refer to the guidelines, previous design patterns, best practices, do’s and don’ts and much more. It could go either way when the developers add the new codes to the existing framework or integrate old codes with the new framework.

Working within the strict guidelines limits the scope for the developers to implement innovative and unique UI elements. If under any condition, developers deviate from the guidelines, they might break the design and element pattern and harm the consistency of the UI framework.

Application UI undergoes frequent updates and maintenance. As the UI evolves, it might deviate from the design and element guidelines. It is time-consuming and involves strict vigilance. Patch fixes are always more critical than the new builds. There is always a chance that the time, expenses and effort can go overboard. Hence, it is a complex effort to maintain the cost of consistency in the UI framework.

Balancing consistency together with flexibility and innovation is a challenge in UI framework development. The existing UI framework can have legacy codes that might not fit with the new UI framework. Hence blending the new and old components together and maintaining the user experience simultaneously can have significant challenges.

As user requirements and preferences keep changing, maintaining consistency in the UI framework can be challenging. There is less scope to encourage innovative ideas and concepts for rigid UI design requirements. Balancing consistency with the need for flexibility and innovation is a challenge in UI framework development.

Banks have specific goals and project requirements. However, the main goal is to ensure that the UI framework is intuitive, offers outstanding user experience, reduces cognitive load, and improves brand visibility. The need is to balance the cost of consistency ensuring the goals are achieved.

Is testing the UI framework in banking applications a complex task? How complex is the testing process? Can it affect the cost of consistency in the UI framework for banking applications?

As banking application deals with multiple sensitive data and financial transactions, ensuring reliability, security, usability, accessibility, and more is crucial. Validating the banking application UI framework is a complex task due to multiple factors.

Security: The security of banking applications is essential. The UI framework must ensure the security of banking applications. Hence, testing the banking application’s UI framework becomes a necessity. There can be requests for multiple changes in the UI framework for banking applications as customer requirements and preferences change. While implementing the changes, the UI framework may have issues with security breaches. Testing the security of banking applications can be complex because of their ever-changing nature. If not balanced well, the cost can fluctuate due to its inconsistent user behaviour.

Regulation and compliance: Banking applications must adhere to stringent regulatory requirements like GDPR, PCI DSS, and more. Testing the UI framework of banking applications w.r.t. compliance and regulation can be complex. Regulatory compliance is never static. It changes frequently based on industry roll-out, and financial institutions must adapt to the modifications. Oftentimes, banks have very little time to adapt to the changes. Left with fewer options, banks might have to quickly adopt the regulatory guidelines, which might increase the cost, making it hard to keep it consistent.

Multi-Platform and device: The UI framework of banking applications must be consistent and work seamlessly across various platforms and devices. Testing the uniformity of UI framework across diverse platforms and devices can be challenging. Maintaining a consistent UI framework across all platforms and devices can be an elaborate task where the cost can increase. Hence testing the UI framework while maintaining the cost of consistency for banking applications can be complex.

Integration: Banking applications often integrate with various third-party services, which also reflects on the banking applications’ user interface. If the third-party vendor makes the smallest changes in the user interface it might directly impact the banking applications. UI testing highlights the issues, but testing the user interface framework of banking applications while maintaining the cost of consistency is a complex task. 

Performance: Banking applications must handle a high volume of concurrent users and transactions. It puts an immense load on the UI framework. Owing to the massive load, the application may face performance bottlenecks. It is tough to maintain the UI framework consistency under this immense load. Also, expenses may fluctuate to ensure that the UI framework remains consistent.

Usability: Intuitive and user-friendly user interfaces are the two aspects of banking applications. The User Interface of banking applications can be complex, considering user profiles, workflow and use cases and scenarios. Testing the UI framework with diverse features can be tricky. It is also hard to maintain the cost of consistency in the diversity of UI frameworks.

Continuous Updates: Continuous updates and changes are common in banking applications due to multiple factors like regulatory compliance, security threats, and customer expectations. The multiple updates and constant changes can affect the UI of banking applications making it even more complex to validate and ensure the overall quality of applications. Also, regular updates and changes can affect the cost of consistency of the UI framework.

Cross-Browser Compatibility: Customers access banking applications across multiple browsers and devices. The UI framework can vary greatly given that the customers use diverse devices and browsers to access services. Maintaining the uniform functionality and performance of the UI framework across all devices and browsers can be challenging. The cost of consistency in the UI framework for banking may vary depending on the changes and updates required for different browsers and devices. It is a challenge to keep up the level of consistency in the UI framework.

How can we improve the cost of consistency in a UI framework for banking applications?

The main factor for the fluctuating cost in the UI framework is the amount of changes and updates involved towards building the banking application UI framework. With changes and updates comes the requirement to validate the applications frequently. The requirement to test the applications shifts from testing new features to testing the existing features. The volume of old features in comparison to the new ones increases faster adding to the need of validating the old features repeatedly. Repeated testing increases the cost if done manually. Test automation is a viable solution that allows testing of a larger sample of usage conditions at a lower cost-time and picks up only a few exceptions for further evaluation.

Investing in the right automation tool can offer maximum consistency since the same test case runs multiple times without deviation. Once the team implements the test automation tool, they reap the potential benefits, like achieving the highest test coverage and sampling of the software functionality faster and with a lower execution effort than they will get with pure manual efforts. Automated tests run efficiently round-the-clock, significantly reducing the overall time-to-test, and giving more time to development teams to fix any potential issues. Test automation requires little or no manual intervention. To address the testing complexities and improve the cost of consistency, the quality assurance, development, and compliance teams combine regression testing, security testing, and performance testing, of which a massive chunk of regression testing is automated to reduce time, effort, and money. It can also streamline the testing process.

Hence, one way to improve the cost of consistency in the UI framework for banking applications is by implementing a code review process to establish design and coding standards and check for consistency in naming conventions, styling, and component usage. Automation testing solutions can efficiently and quickly catch inconsistencies like unintended design variations in the UI framework to save cost and time. It is essential to regularly test the UI framework across various platforms and browsers and fix compatibility issues. One more way we can improve the cost of consistency in a UI framework for banking applications is by integrating the UI framework into the CI/CD pipeline. It enables test automation simultaneously with deployment to ensure the latest updates are validated on the go. The UI framework of banking applications must be consistent, secure, and user-friendly across different channels, making it easier for customers to interact with the bank’s digital services.

Conclusion

Organizations can improve cost consistency and business operations by automating the testing process of banking application UI frameworks. In the modern age, banking relies a great deal on digital applications. Multiple and frequent changes can affect the digital application, causing many issues. It is essential to validate the application to fix the errors and maintain the UI performance. Automation testing facilitates the testing process and saves the cost required for repeated testing, ensuring cost consistency in banking applications UI frameworks.

Yethi’s robotic codeless test automation solution, Tenjin, ensures quality testing of screen elements on your digital and mobile assets. It incorporates real-time testing of native and hybrid mobile applications across diverse platforms, thereby eliminating delays and redundancies. Tenjin can reduce the testing time by 15-20% as it has a domain-specific test library of over half a million test cases.

In addition, Tenjin is six times faster in detecting the changes on screens and the point-n-shoot feature tests only the changed feature, allowing the team to save time and cost significantly. It improves the cost of consistency in the UI framework of banking applications.