B2B Financial Services Platform
Our goal was to reduce company costs and save users’ time by changing the process for a certain financial transaction from manual to digital.
Users:
Financial professionals
User Goals:
Complete a specific financial transaction without manual calls to client services
My Role:
Product Designer, User Researcher
Business Goals:
Reduce costs by replacing a semi-manual system with a digital platform.
Project Length:
3 months, ongoing
The Team:
Remote group of product team members, business stakeholders, and another designer
Project Summary
Heads up! This product hasn’t been shipped yet, so I can’t show visuals or go into extensive detail.
This product is part of a larger initiative to transfer a largely manual process over to a digital platform. The previous experience required users to fill out/upload tax forms and contact the client service department to check the status of a transaction. Not only did this require extra work and waiting time on the users’ end, but also cost the company more money to facilitate manual communication.
The product is a sub-product of a larger product and follows a similar flow to other sub-products. We wanted to create a solution that wouldsave design/development time and money and offer users a consistent experience across products.
We decided to test the hypothesis that the same flow used for the other sub-products would work well for users performing this transaction.
Our research focused on the following questions:
Can participants successfully complete certain tasks related to this transaction in the platform?
How are participants currently completing the transaction?
How can we apply these findings to other existing sub-products?
We conducted 5 moderated usability tests with clients & prospects to test our hypothesis.
My design partner, product manager, and I scheduled calls with 5 different financial professionals to learn about their workflow and test the prototype. After testing, I synthesized research findings into an affinity map and PowerPoint deck to share with stakeholders.
Our primary findings included the following:
Some participants complete the transaction individually, while others complete in batch. Our platform should support the ability to do both.
Some flows contained confusing steps.
Tax reporting and payments were a key part of the transaction. We didn’t address this much in our product.
Participants who were current customers appreciated the consistency between the prototype and existing products
Several participants (esp. prospects) had trouble finding the transaction status.
We learned about one of our primary competitors.
I learned the importance of collaboration with stakeholders in conducting effective research.
This project was on a B2B platform with highly specialized users. Our team found it helpful to collaborate with an internal financial subject matter expert during our usability testing in order to translate financial jargon and make sure we weren’t missing important tax forms, etc.
In addition, my design partner and I worked closely with our product manager in order to ensure alignment and collaborative decision making.