Case Study : Solving the complexity of financial tools with tons of functionality and customization.

Role: Lead UX Designer & Researcher Additional Members: Fellow UX'ers, Product Managers and Developers Tools: Sketch, Invision

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I am the Lead UX designer and Researcher on the Enterprise Design team, leading research and design on multiple internal products, primarily focused on cash management, working capital and trade finance solution for multinational corporations, financial institutions and public sector organizations around the globe.

Unfortunately, due to privacy reasons, I can’t show the bulk of my work that I did at Citi, so for now, you’ll just have to trust that I actually did quite a lot during the ~4 years (2 years as a contractor from Infosys and 2 years as a full time employee).

So, here are some brief notes on one of my most recent project that I'm working on which also describes my research and design process.

Overview

The Application that I'm working on is a part of the Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) department within Citi Group. We are working on a product that was last touched in ~1990's and had no research behind designs both from a UI and UX perspective. It was a java based application and only worked on Internet Explorer.

• Usage was negligible.

• User experience was cumbersome, confusing, and causing customers to flock to other competitors who had more modern experiences.

The need to upgrade the product came into light when Microsoft decided to end the support for Internet Explorer this year and clients started to push for the product to be compatible with other new age browsers.

So, we planned a 3 phased approach...

My UX Process

Phase 1 : Starting on the right foot

Problems & Challenges

After engaging with the Product Managers to get the design brief in the kick-off workshops, we realized that the problem was deeply rooted. It was not just about making it compatible with other browsers but also educating the entire team (Business Analysts, Customer Support and Development Teams) about what is UX?

Discovery Research

During the stakeholder interviews, apart from understanding the business goals and requirements,

• we ensured that the product managers understand the importance of research and its impact on user experience by proposing to conduct user Interviews.

• Since the product was two decades old and 80% of us were new in the team, we made sure that the Dev, Product and UX are engaged on day 1 of the discovery phase so that we all are on the same page.

UX Strategy & T-shirt sizing

Based on the knowledge acquired during these sessions with stakeholders, we were quickly able to derive a plan to address the known and unknowns.

We clearly,

• Defined business goals

• Established constraints, deadlines

• Agreed on resources and budgets

• Analyzed available data and defined what's missing

• Defined problem statements

• Defined a research plan and discussion guides

Phase 2 - Designing the right thing

User Research

User research is a reality check. It tells you what really happens when people use computers. You can speculate on what customers want, or you can find out. The latter is the more fruitful approach. ~ Jakob Nielsen

We started recruiting people who represented our core user group in collaboration with our client facing teams. We identified the clients who were best suited for the interviews based on three criteria,

1. Client Size - Small, Medium & Large

2. Highest frequency of use and

3. Highest no. of queries to support teams

The objectives of the client interviews was to,

• Validate user journeys

• Identify patterns and drilldown methods

• Understand the internal workflows

• Gather feedback on current usage, volume and frequency and

• Identify pain points

We collected around 160 data points which included a combination of feedback regarding the above and some noteworthy comments.

Research Analysis

After the interviews concluded, we started analyzing the massive data gathered about user behavior in the current application. We created an Affinity Map to organize our insights and ideas into similar theme.

Phase 3 : Design the thing right

Wireframes

These insights and ideas proved as a solid foundation on which we built our low fidelity designs. After several iterations while brainstorming with stakeholders we were ready to test the prototype with our users.

Usability Testing

We approached the same set of users again for testing the solution that we built. It was time to test the waters!

We observed the users as they attempted to use the designs while thinking out loud. We understood how intuitive my team’s design is, and how adaptable it is to meeting user needs.

We tested the prototypes for the following KPI's,

• Task success rate

• System Usability Scale (SUS)

• Time-on-task

• Search vs navigation

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

The Conclusion

We distributed the scenarios into smaller tasks and captured the results on a rainbow spreadsheet. I usually prefer this method during usability testing because its easy to capture and scan it to identify the most common behaviors among test participants. And finally

• 95% participants were able to successfully complete the given tasks

• Users rated Avg. 4.5 out of 5 on ease of use.

• Avg. time to task reduced from 10 mins to 3 mins for the CRUD operations. A whooping 70% improvement.

• Avg. time to task reduces from 3 mins to 30 seconds for investigative activities(search).

• Users preferred Search over navigation because it was a reporting tool having access to historical data and users mostly used it for investigative purposes.

• Navigation was also easy as we redid the information architecture and validated with the users

• Users rated 4 out of 5 when asked how satisfied they feel with the new designs.

Some noteworthy comments,

I love this new design! Its easier and faster to navigate. And having a dashboard where you can see all the pending items in a single screen is great to have.

I liked the simplification of the forms. I don't require an instructor next to me as it's very easy to understand.

This will make my day to day job sooo easy. Thank you!

As Albert Einstein said,

My ultimate mission as a UX Designer and Researcher is to solve a specific user problem, and this starts with defining a clear and actionable problem statement.

Until we empathize with our users, it will be very hard to come up with a solution, so think like Einstein and give this problem-framing stage the time it deserves.

Please drop a like 💗 if you like my work. :)