Let’s start with a scenario that might feel familiar.
You’re mid-way through a project. The design team have mapped the flow, built the wireframes, and is ready to finesse the microcopy. It all feels intuitive, clear, and user-friendly. Then the compliance team arrives.
Suddenly, you're adding two extra steps, three warning modals, and a scrollable wall of regulatory text. The journey gets longer. The experience gets clunkier. It all feels profoundly sub-optimal.
If you work in fintech or any regulated industry, you’ve likely lived this. Design wants clarity and flow. Compliance wants caution and control. When they collide, things can get messy.
Lately, they’ve been colliding more often, thanks, in part to the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation, which puts the onus on firms to prove that their digital journeys lead to good customer outcomes.
At Clearleft, we recently ran a survey of compliance and design professionals across UK financial organisations. The results were revealing. Not because they pointed to villains or heroes, but because they uncovered a shared sense of frustration and a surprising amount of goodwill.
Late to the party
One of the clearest themes was timing - or lack of it.
"The compliance team is usually brought in late… which causes last-minute changes that can disrupt and add extra cost."
It’s not that compliance wants to slow things down. It’s that they’re often invited in too late to meaningfully shape things - so their feedback becomes a blocker, not a co-creator.
Speaking different languages
Another common struggle was lack of shared context.
"Compliance teams need to be educated with background information each time."
Designers often forget that compliance teams weren’t in the early workshops, haven’t met the users, and don’t know the nuances of the journey. And compliance, for their part, sometimes interprets rules with little appreciation for the realities of interaction design.
Same Goal, different tools
Despite the friction, both sides want the same thing: to protect customers. And when that alignment clicks, everybody benefits.
"Designers were heavily involved in re-designing the customer experience for offboarded customers. Compliance advised what we could and couldn’t do, and helped build buy-in."
This wasn’t a tug-of-war. It was a collaboration. Compliance provided the constraints within which designers could weave their magic. And it didn’t only result in more effective design, it also made it easier to gain decision-maker approval.
So what do we do about It?
From our survey (and from our experience), a few ideas stand out:
- Start together. Run a joint kick-off workshop where design and compliance explore goals, constraints and user needs side by side.
- Show your thinking. Share journey maps, research, and rationale early. Help compliance teams understand why a design exists, not just what it looks like.
- Test with a compliance lens. Run usability testing that looks at fairness, comprehension and risk - not just friction.
- Create shared playbooks. Codify what "good" looks like when it comes to balancing regulatory clarity and design simplicity.
The bigger picture
For designers, adhering to regulations can feel like counter-productive box-ticking. But when compliance is seen as a design constraint, rather than a straitjacket, it can inspire better products that help customers - and organisations - get the outcomes they really need.
It’s about designing in the real world, where simplicity must coexist with legality. But It’s also a reminder that good design isn’t always about reducing clicks. Sometimes it’s about helping someone make a confident, informed decision - even if that takes a little longer.
"It’s as easy to lose your life savings in a risky fund as it is to order a coffee to go."
That quote stuck with us. Because that’s the real design brief: not just to delight, but to protect.
If you're trying to navigate this tension in your work, we’d love to hear how you're approaching it. And if you want a partner to help you bridge the gap between design and governance - you know where to find us.