GoKawiilAsk a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
There are two things I’ve tried to take a hard pass on when working on consumer-facing financial services apps.
A “document hub”.
And a “notifications centre”.
You can picture both without any help from me. To my mind they’re both examples of letting the organisation off the hook at the expense of the user. Although it’s fair to say that plenty of users have now been trained to expect these things, and to know roughly how they work — even though they’re crap.
The problem underneath is real enough. The business has legacy systems that produce PDFs — letters, statements, that sort of thing — because originally they’d have been sent out in the post. Compliance experts will also talk to you about “persistent communications channels”. So you need somewhere in the app to put all of that.
The lazy solution is a document hub. A list of files you can select and open.
Seems simple.
Except every stakeholder involved wants to do a Columbo and add just one more thing. By the end you’ve essentially rebuilt Google Drive, with tagging, archiving, printing and sharing across several channels, each with its own quirks. Not to mention clearing the security and authentication hurdles so the right person sees only the right documents. And so on, and so on.
And that is just to build the thing.
... continue reading