World Usability Day 2026 | Designing a sustainable future with ethical AI

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Imagine initiating a payout for your business. The request has been submitted, but the transaction status reads Processing. Has the money left your account? Will the recipient receive it? Should you wait, initiate another transaction, or contact support?

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For a business managing multiple payments, these questions are not trivial. Uncertainty around a transaction can affect cash flow, operational decisions, and confidence in the financial platform being used.

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The underlying payment infrastructure may be working exactly as intended. Yet, if the user cannot understand what is happening, the experience is incomplete.

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This distinction sits at the heart of good user experience design, particularly in fintech, where people interact with systems that influence how they manage and move money.

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As financial technology evolves and artificial intelligence becomes increasingly relevant to how products are built and operated, the challenge for fintech companies is no longer simply to make systems faster or more intelligent. It is to make them understandable, trustworthy, accessible, and responsible.

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This year's World Usability Day theme, "Designing a Sustainable Future with Ethical AI," offers an opportunity to reflect on that responsibility.

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Good fintech UX goes beyond the interface

In financial technology, a good user experience is often associated with faster transactions, simpler navigation, and fewer steps to complete an action. While these are important, they represent only part of the experience.

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Consider what happens when a payment fails, a transaction remains pending, or a verification process produces an unexpected outcome.

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Users need more than a visually appealing interface. They need accurate information, clear communication, and appropriate next steps.

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At Kora, designing payout experiences involves thinking carefully about how different transaction outcomes are represented. A successful transaction, a failed transaction, and one that is still processing should not communicate the same thing.

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Each status represents a different system state and carries different implications for the user.

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For example, a processing transaction may require the user to wait for an update, while a failed transaction may require investigation or corrective action. Presenting these outcomes without sufficient distinction can create uncertainty and potentially encourage users to initiate duplicate transactions.

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The design challenge is therefore not simply about choosing the right status label. It is about understanding the underlying transaction lifecycle and translating that complexity into information users can act on.

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Good UX makes complex systems easier to understand without requiring users to understand the complexity behind them.

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Designing for the moments when things go wrong

One of the most important considerations in financial product design is how a system behaves when the expected journey breaks down.

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A user initiating a payout expects it to be completed. But what happens when it isn't?

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Feedback from Customer Success at Kora has identified unclear error messages as a recurring source of friction in the payout experience. This highlights an important design consideration: an error message should do more than announce that something went wrong. It should help the user understand the situation and determine what to do next.

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A useful error message should answer three questions:

1. What happened? Clearly communicate the issue without unnecessary technical language.
2. What does it mean? Explain how the issue affects the user's transaction or intended action.
3. What happens next? Provide an appropriate next step, whether that involves waiting, retrying, providing additional information, or contacting support.

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This requires collaboration between Design, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. The design team must understand the technical behaviour behind an error, while engineering and product teams must help determine what information can be communicated accurately and safely.

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The same principle applies to transaction details and internal operational tools.

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When a payment requires investigation, technical support teams need access to relevant transaction and processor information to understand what happened. Designing for these internal workflows is just as important as designing the customer-facing experience.

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After all, the quality of a user's experience can depend on how effectively the people supporting the product can identify and resolve issues.

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This is why usability should be considered across the entire service ecosystem, not just the screens customers interact with.

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Ethical AI is also a user experience responsibility

Artificial intelligence introduces new possibilities for financial services. It can help organisations process information, identify patterns, automate tasks, and support more responsive financial experiences. 

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However, as AI becomes more involved in financial processes, important questions emerge about the people affected by its decisions.

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Imagine an automated system flags a payout for additional review. The merchant receives a notification that the transaction has been held, but little information about what happens next. The system may have identified a legitimate concern. 

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However, from the merchant's perspective, an expected payment is now delayed. What information should the merchant receive? Can they understand the reason for the review without compromising sensitive security information? Is there an appropriate escalation process? What happens if the system makes an incorrect assessment?

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These questions demonstrate why ethical AI cannot be treated exclusively as an engineering or data science responsibility. The technology may determine an outcome, but design influences how that outcome is communicated and experienced.

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Several principles become particularly important:

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1. Transparency and explainability: Users should receive meaningful information about AI involvement and decisions that affect them, where appropriate. Explanations should be understandable without exposing sensitive security mechanisms or proprietary system logic.
2. Fairness and inclusion: AI systems should be evaluated for unintended differences in outcomes across users and operating contexts. Differences in language, accessibility needs, and available data should not be overlooked.
3. Privacy: Personal and financial information must be handled responsibly, with careful consideration of what information is collected, processed, and exposed.
4. Human control and accountability: Where automated decisions significantly affect users, there should be appropriate mechanisms for review, correction, or escalation. People should not be left without recourse when a system makes a mistake.

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Ethical AI is not simply about whether a model produces an accurate result. It is also about whether the overall experience respects the people affected by that result.

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Research helps us design beyond assumptions

Good design does not begin and end with what product teams believe users need. It requires a continuous effort to understand how people actually interact with products.

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In fintech, this is particularly important because financial workflows can be complex, and business needs may differ significantly depending on operations, markets, and transaction volumes.

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At Kora, strengthening our approach to customer understanding through research, feedback, and product insights is key to building better experiences.

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Different sources of information help reveal different aspects of the user journey.

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Customer feedback can highlight recurring frustrations. Product analytics can reveal where users encounter friction or abandon a process. Usability testing can expose difficulties that may not be obvious from usage data alone. Direct conversations with users can help explain the motivations and expectations behind their behaviour.

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Together, these insights give product teams a stronger foundation for making design decisions.

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This becomes even more important when AI is involved. A system may perform well against its technical metrics while still creating unexpected difficulties for certain users.

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Without continuous evaluation, these problems can remain unnoticed.

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Research helps teams challenge assumptions, identify unintended consequences, and understand whether the solutions being built are delivering meaningful value.

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The goal is not simply to build products that work, but to understand whether they work well for the people using them.

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Sustainability means thinking beyond immediate efficiency

The word sustainability often brings environmental considerations to mind. While these are important, sustainability in digital product design also involves considering the long-term value and consequences of the systems we create.

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An automated process may reduce manual work but generate additional support requests if users cannot understand its outcomes. A feature may speed up a workflow while introducing complexity elsewhere in the customer journey.

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These are examples of why efficiency alone is not a sufficient measure of success.

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Sustainable financial experiences should reduce unnecessary effort, communicate clearly, remain accessible, and support users as their needs evolve.

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They should also account for failure, recovery, and the long-term relationship between users and the technology they depend on.

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For fintech companies, this means evaluating product decisions beyond whether a feature has been successfully implemented or whether a process has been automated.

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It means asking whether the solution improves the overall experience and whether those improvements can be sustained as the product scales.

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Building the future requires shared responsibility

Designing trustworthy financial experiences is not the responsibility of one team.

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Designers help translate complex functionality into understandable interactions. Engineers build the systems that make those experiences possible. Product managers define the problems worth solving and navigate competing priorities.

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Data and AI practitioners help establish how intelligent systems are developed and evaluated. Risk and Compliance teams provide important safeguards, while Customer Success brings valuable insight into the challenges users encounter.

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Each function contributes a different perspective, and meaningful progress depends on bringing those perspectives together.

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As AI becomes more integrated into financial technology, this collaboration will become increasingly important.

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The questions we ask during product development should extend beyond what a system can do:

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• What problem are we solving for the user?
• What happens when the system produces an unexpected outcome?
• Can users understand decisions that affect them?
• Have we considered accessibility, fairness, and privacy?
• Is there an appropriate path for human intervention?
• How will we know whether the experience is actually improving?

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These questions should inform decisions throughout the product lifecycle, from discovery and design to development, launch, and continuous improvement.

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The future of fintech must remain human-centred

Technology will continue to evolve. AI will introduce new capabilities, financial infrastructure will become more sophisticated, and the ways businesses interact with financial services will keep changing.

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But the fundamental principles of good design will remain relevant.

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People need to understand what is happening, know what to expect, and have confidence that the systems they rely on are designed with their interests in mind.

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World Usability Day 2026 is an opportunity to reflect on how we can uphold these principles as financial technology becomes increasingly intelligent.

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At Kora, we believe building better financial experiences requires looking beyond the technology itself and considering the people, businesses, and workflows it supports.

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Because the measure of a successful financial product is not simply how quickly it processes transactions or how much it can automate.

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It is how effectively it helps people accomplish what matters to them.

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As we design a more intelligent future for fintech, we must ensure that it is also more understandable, accessible, trustworthy, and human.

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