Edition 42 - FIFA vs PES: the battle of the UX.

Hey folks, 👋🏽

Thanks for coming back to Double-click! Great to have you as always and here’s hoping you take away some little nuggets of learnings or ideas to help in your daily lives. 

Last week you may have noticed that the 11:FS Pulse team dropped their shiny new annual report of 2023. 🎉 This report showcases some of the best user experiences of 2022 as well as asking industry leaders their predictions for the next hot topics of 2023. 

If you haven’t seen or heard about it yet Lindsey and Joe from the team did an awesome job so go read it here.

The report got me thinking about UX across lateral industries, and how willing some folks can be to go through a painful experience in order to achieve the thing they need to achieve at the end. But when we talk about successful UX, really it’s the end-to-end journey that far surpasses those who have doubled down on distribution only. 

Let’s double click. 👇🏽

FIFA vs PES.

Back when I had the time to play video games for hours on end I remember the great debate on which was better: FIFA or PES. For those who had better things to do these are both football computer games and while both had exactly the same premise they had completely and totally different user experiences. 

Arguably, once you were into a match, PES had the advantage of better graphics and general game play. This was the biggest draw to those who weren’t irked by the atrocious menu system that made interacting with the rest of the game soooo bad.

FIFA however had an average in-game experience but what made it superior was the overall UX from the moment the gamer logged on. With 15 years of EA Sports legacy on top of the latest backend technology, their ability to create menu systems where you click two buttons and you’re playing meant that you could forgive the less sophisticated match play.

What’s interesting is after sales of PES rivalled FIFA for the reasons mentioned above during the 2000s, FIFA responded by initially taking the best bits from PES’s in-game design and applying it to their own series. As we say at 11:FS - learn from the best and steal with pride! 

But FIFA didn't stop there. After levelling up their in-game design they then went on to create an entirely integrated experience, everything from a dope soundtrack to celebrity partnerships and doubling down on the fundamentally brilliant basics. 

Beauty really was more than just skin deep as it was the holistic experience they got right rather than just the bit on the pitch.

User resilience. 

No, this doesn't just apply to gaming. When it comes to UX design in financial services, it’s astonishing how many people will continue to soldier through a terrible experience just to reach the thing they want to achieve at the end of it. The difference between this and the gaming industry though is that often this hardship is done through desperation rather than choice. 

PES players were happy to navigate through the nonsense just as long as they got to play the seriously cool version of a virtual football game. Bob Smith applying for an overdraft however has to put food on the table and pay for increased heating bills. 

Sometimes it's a choice, and other times it’s an unwaning channel preference.  

An example of this was back in my days working at a big bank. I witnessed a huge percentage of people applying for loans on a mobile, even though there was literally no mobile-optimised application and it was incredibly painful! Still people were hellbent on going through the janky motions because they wanted that loan and also the alternative of travelling to a branch was inconvenient. 

Industry standards have shifted to be more customer focussed over the years and the competitive set is so high that people are no longer prepared to put up with crappy UX. We’ve moved to a model where financial services are no longer just about purchasing, but about the ownership experience. 

Buying vs owning. 

This for me is the shift we have witnessed. Financial services has moved from an industry trying to sell analog products through digital channels to one trying to service them. We know today that ownership has a much greater level of impact on customer satisfaction than purely the sales process.

If we look at the insurance industry as a standout example, the impetus has always been on acquisition. Customer needs a thing, customer buys a thing. The end. Servicing? Forget about it!

But the best UX isn’t just something that happens in order to sell a financial instrument (buying), it's really about supporting customers through the longevity of using it well (owning). 

This begs the question - is digital a distribution channel or is it your day to day experience with customers?

If we look at the organisations who are doing this stuff well (cue 11:FS Pulse report!), we can see that they are designed in a way that doesn’t just abandon their customers at a point of need or after the sales messages. That human touch is with them every step of the way, layering in contextual information that allows the product to do more for them once they have passed the acquisition stage.

Read more on this.

If you’re not off playing FIFA (or PES) after reading this then take a look at the report as there’s a whole lot more analysis on what good UX means in financial services today. We have come a long way as an industry in the last decade when it comes to understanding customers and designing for those jobs but as we always say at 11:FS, we really are only 1% finished on this journey.

Hope you enjoyed that but feedback always welcome so drop me a line david@11fs.com and let me know what you think. 

See you next week. 👋🏽

D