Towards a simpler way to connect | Salt Edge

Our mission here at Salt Edge is to provide everyone with a good knowledge of their finances, wherever they are. Connect, being the most common interface available to the end-user, is the most important UI we have as part of the Salt Edge platform. It is therefore very important to carefully optimize it in order to provide the best experience for our clients’ users. Before we even start examining a redesign like this, we need to answer a simple, but important question:

What is the value that Connect provides to the end user?

Well, securely connecting your data to your app, of course! However, this statement has an important consequence: as a user, you won’t use Salt Edge, you might not even be aware of its existence. Connect is just a means of easily importing your data, that’s it. It’s a tool which you need to get out of as soon as possible. This idea — of Connect being a tool — was central to the new design. We wanted to take just the crucial interaction, i.e. finding your provider and remodel it to be quick and let us collect as much data as we can. To illustrate the change, here’s how the old interface looked like: And the new one: This apparently simple change has enabled us to achieve several important goals:

• Find and connect faster and simpler;
• Provide better localization support (the user can now input anything related to a bank, country or provider and we’ll find it);
• Provide actionable steps for the user if we don’t yet support the provider;
• Measure everything the user inputs (hat tip to Igor, our client for suggesting this);
• Prepare the ground for extensions (we have a couple of nice features on the way, stay tuned!)

We’re sure this can and will be improved, but it’s a great step towards a better understanding of our clients’ users and their needs. If you have any tips on how this might be improved, even more, feel free to drop us a line or use the simple Twitter input box to write us @saltedge.