When Experience Shapes the Interface: UX and UI in Palestinian Fintech Apps

Open almost any finance app and you will find two layers working together. One is what you see: colours, type, icons, screens, buttons. The other is what you live through: whether the app feels useful, whether you understand it, whether you trust it with your money. Designers call the first layer the user interface (UI) and the second the user experience (UX). In practice the two are often handled by different people, judged by different metrics and improved on different schedules.

In financial technology this split is costly. Money apps ask a lot of ordinary people: they handle sensitive data, irreversible actions and unfamiliar vocabulary. A polished interface that ignores real needs ends up crowded and confusing, and a sound experience strategy that never reaches the screen goes unnoticed. This PhD thesis set out to look at how the two layers actually relate, in a market that had received very little research attention: Palestine.

Why Palestine, and why now

Fintech in Palestine is young. The thesis describes a sector that grew quickly once mobile wallets and digital payments were permitted, yet still operates under heavy constraints: limited mobile broadband, no national currency, and physical separation between regions. Many adults remain outside the formal financial system, which makes well-designed digital services more than a convenience; they are part of how financial inclusion can happen at all.

At the same time, the thesis notes that most earlier studies of fintech UX focused on single apps or on markets far from the region, and that many looked at only one factor, such as ease of use. A related study of banking software (Haziri, 2019) used a different method in a different country. The research also responds to a direction proposed by earlier work on user involvement in fintech product design (Oluwatobi, 2022): to examine geographic and cultural context, not only the product itself.

The research question

The thesis asks one central question:

What is the impact of user experience design on user interface design in fintech applications in Palestine?

Around it sit supporting aims: to measure how satisfied users are with the experience and with the interface of the apps they use, to test whether the two are related, to identify which parts of the experience actually shape how the interface is perceived, and to check whether personal characteristics (gender, age, education, region) or app-related factors (which app, which type of account) change the picture.

How it was studied

The study is quantitative. Users of three Palestinian FinTech apps were reached with a questionnaire, and 257 completed responses formed the final sample. A small pilot group was used first to check the instrument, and a panel of specialists reviewed the items before the survey went out.

The questionnaire drew on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) family of scales (Schrepp & Thomaschewski, 2019) and on the UX and UI literature. It covered two blocks, rated on a five-point agreement scale:

• User experience, in eight dimensions: attractiveness, efficiency, usefulness, clarity, personalisation, controllability (predictable, supportive responses), trust and security, and content quality.
• User interface, in four dimensions: visual design, interaction design, information architecture, and branding.

The data were analysed in SPSS using reliability and validity checks, correlation, multiple regression, and group comparisons (t-tests and analysis of variance).

What the thesis found

1. Both layers were rated positively, but not enthusiastically. Users gave the experience and the interface of these apps a relatively good rating overall. The thesis is careful to describe this as solid agreement rather than strong satisfaction, leaving clear room for improvement.

2. Strengths and gaps were uneven. On the experience side, usefulness was the strongest point: people felt the apps helped them reach their goals and saved time. Personalisation was the weakest. On the interface side, interaction design scored best, while information architecture (how content and navigation are organised) came last. The author reads this as a sign that some providers push services and data to users quickly, for competitive reasons, without fully designing how that information flows.

3. Experience and interface move together. The analysis showed a strong, positive and statistically significant relationship between UX and UI. Where users rated the experience well, they also rated the interface well, and vice versa.

4. Four experience factors drive how the interface is perceived. When the dimensions were tested together, four aspects of the experience had a significant effect on UI ratings: attractiveness, clarity, trust and security, and content quality. The remaining dimensions did not show a separate effect once these were accounted for. The thesis links the weight of trust and security to the local context: a history of conflict and economic pressure, and real concerns about fraud and digital attacks, make users more cautious about financial apps.

5. Context matters. Some differences appeared between user groups by gender, age and region, while education made no difference. One of the three apps stood out on several interface and experience dimensions, and the thesis suggests studying it as a reference case.

What this means for designers and product teams

The central lesson is that a good interface alone does not guarantee a good experience. The two must be developed together, because improving one without the other leaves value on the table. In practical terms, the thesis points teams towards:

• Treating attractiveness, clarity, trust and security, and content quality as core criteria when designing and evaluating a financial app interface.
• Investing in information architecture: clear sections, meaningful navigation, well-prepared data and visible instructions.
• Taking personalisation seriously, since it was the weakest experience dimension.
• Doing real research on target groups instead of assuming one design fits every user, and keeping designers learning.
• Exploring gamification and artificial intelligence as ways to make financial products more engaging, which the thesis identifies as promising directions for future work.

Limits

The author is open about the study's constraints. Prior research in this setting was scarce. Companies did not open their apps or databases for in-depth study. Reaching users evenly across the West Bank and Gaza was difficult because of geographic separation, so the research relied on a single method and a single data-collection tool, an online questionnaire. The thesis also treats UI design as the outcome variable; it recommends future work with mixed methods, mediating variables, and other outcomes such as satisfaction, loyalty or revenue, as well as tests in other sectors such as health and education.

About the original study

Wasef Qadah, Finansal Teknoloji Endüstrisinde Kullanıcı Deneyimi Tasarımının Kullanıcı Arayüzü Tasarımına Etkisi (The Impact of User Experience Design on User Interface Design in the FinTech Industry). Doctoral thesis (Proficiency in Art), Graphic Design, Graduate School, Istanbul Arel University, 2023. Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Güler Ertan; co-supervisor: Dr. İsmail Ergen.