900 days of progress

More than 900 days ago, I published a series of case studies called the UX of Banking. These benchmarked and compared the user experience of 12 banks in the UK.

It was a forensic process: logging, timing and cataloging everything on their mobile apps.

Those 6 chapters from 2020 demonstrated how far ahead the challengers (Monzo, Starling and Revolut) really were, compared to most of the high street banks.

Has the gap widened? Which of the legacy banks are actually chipping away at the deficit? And ultimately, which are stale experiences that consumers should avoid?

Over time people demand better user experiences from mainstream apps. Having a great UX is no longer a unique selling point—in most industries it's a necessity.

Some of these were obvious bugs, many were highlighting missing context, and all of them resolvable to a meaningful degree.

To be clear, building complicated products rarely follows a linear path of progression. But over a multi-year span, the ability to resolve these issues, and innovate around technical limitations is key.

Here's how they got on:

Note: the three 'challengers' have been grouped at the top of this chart for clarity.