Combining Takaful Domain and UI/UX Expertise: A Dual-Expert Review of a Shariah-Compliant Conversational Agent for Islamic Financial Literacy among Marginalized Communities
Keywords:
Dual-Expert Review, Shariah-Compliant Chatbot, Conversational Agent, Islamic Financial Literacy, Takaful, Formative Usability Evaluation, Chatbot Usability ScaleAbstract
Shariah-compliant chatbots are increasingly used to explain Islamic financial products such as Takaful, yet their interfaces are typically modelled on generic chat applications and evaluated only after release through end-user questionnaires. This practice is problematic for marginalized users with uneven financial, digital and language literacy, who are the least able to articulate why an interface fails, and in a faith-based domain a failure of clarity is also a failure of trust. Usability evaluation alone cannot judge whether content, tone and branding suit the Shariah context, while domain review alone cannot diagnose interaction problems. To address this gap, this study proposes and applies a dual-expert review that combines Takaful domain experts from the Malaysian Takaful Association (MTA) with academic UI/UX experts in the formative evaluation of SCAI, a bilingual mobile conversational agent. Domain experts were engaged through a focus group after a prototype demonstration, while UI/UX experts tested the prototype independently and were interviewed with an eleven-item protocol mapped to QUIS, USE and Chatbot Usability Scale (BUS) constructs. Thematic and root-cause analysis yielded four themes: visual design and branding, navigation and interface interaction, language consistency and accessibility, and conversational interaction. Each theme was traced to implemented refinements through a construct-mapped traceability matrix and triangulated against end-user ratings of the refined application (n = 33). The two expert groups surfaced complementary rather than redundant issues: domain experts judged legitimacy, whereas UI/UX experts judged operability. The study contributes four design principles for Shariah-sensitive conversational interfaces, namely legitimacy cues, provenance transparency, linguistic completeness and expectation setting, and argues that in this domain usability is part of how users judge Shariah assurance rather than a cosmetic concern.
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