Also known as the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle says that, for many cases, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. I think that the Pareto principle applies to user experience in financial services in at least three ways:

1) 80% of users use 20% of use cases

Trick question: when users navigate to your website, where do they go? Chances are, 80% or more of the time they go directly to your online banking login. That means they may ignore your homepage, may not read your special offers, and they may not see anything on your product pages.

When you are thinking about making improvements to your online banking site, or to your mobile app, or to your application process, ask yourself: “How will most consumers using this”? Those are the use cases that you should spend the most time on, because those are the cases that will generate the most experiences.

I don’t mean ignore your homepage or your product pages; they are still important engines of conversion, and for certain user profiles, like new account shoppers, they represent 80% of cases. But don’t ignore online banking. Many of Andera’s clients don’t link to product applications from within online banking at all, and in this way lose valuable chances to grow relationships.

You should also apply this principle if you’re thinking about adding new widgets or features to your website or to your online banking platform. If everything you do, you do well, users will ignore what you don’t do at all.  Usually that is a better option than doing a lot of things poorly. The overall user experience is only as good as the worst part of the experience.

2) 20% of components work for 80% of needs

The pareto principle also applies to a single experience. Sometimes designers or developers think that to create a better user experience they need to invent a fancy new tool that makes it easier to do one specific thing. In reality, sometimes the effort required to learn how to use that new tool, or to switch between several tools to complete the same process, can make the experience worse instead of better.

Good user experience design reduces concepts and increases re-use. For example, tabs might not be perfect for the particular use case, but most people already know how to use tabs.  If it’s in at least a few other well established applications, sites, you’re all right, but if it’s not, ask yourself: if it hasn’t been done before, are you sure you have a compelling reason to be different?

Step away from that creative UI solution. Leverage what the user already knows. Sometimes you can actually do both; the startup Flipboard built it’s success on a creative UI solution that imitates something the all users already know how to do; flip the page of a book.

3) 20% of content is relevant 80% of situations.

Financial institutions used to clutter their homepages with every piece of information under the sun. But in reality only a small part of that content is valuable to the average user. Recently we have seen website redesigns from the likes of Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America that have reduced the number of elements on the main page. They feature the 20% of content important to 80% of site vistors, and hide the remaining 80% of content in easy-to-navigate menus or on secondary pages. For example, USAA’s website does this well.

UX designers can use rich layout and custom visuals to emphasize screen elements that are crucial to the task, drawing attention to the most important content and making it extremely easy for users to find. De-emphasize secondary elements, and group them with various “chunking strategies.” You can read some ideas for chunking here.

I hope this post has been helpful. You can follow me on twitter at @devjitbasu.