Digital Project

Up-Turn

A financial institution began it journey to digitise itself. The first step of this is to digitise its most popular products. Market conditions after the pandemic made it an ideal time, allowing them to capture more users with insentives ir current users the convivence of online access and management, transitioning to a digital end to end experience will also allow a wider range of customer to apply.

Agency

ThoughtWorks

Year

2021-2022

Role

Experience Design, Interface design, User researcher, Copy writing, Branding

Exclusive

*This Project is under an NDA. Any assets and designs seen here are fictional recreations were design elements and information have been modified for their privacy.

Problem Statement

How can we provide a digital end to end experience that can capture the post pandemic lifestyle of new perspective customers trying to take advantage of low interest rates?

Project Goals

01

Design a modern digital onboarding process for a financial product

03

Promote independent investment decisions

05

Improve the time for approvals

02

Develop a digital design guideline for form products

04

Design and develop digital communication pathways

06

Improve messaging and copy to improve conversions and future reinvestment

Project impact

Staff and stake holder interviews

Tech stack review

Prototyping

Competitor analysis

Customer journey maps

Usertesting

Workshop:
Rabbit Holes

During the discovery I ran a workshop called Rabbit Holes. This is an excellent workshop to run when engaging is a large and complex projects.

How it works

Provide an A4 piece of paper for each participant and get them to fold four times over itself, producing a nice palm sized card.

Ask them to draw themselves as a rabbit, add glasses or have them do hobbies that they enjoy.

The first purpose for this workshop is to better get to know your team and secondly these rabbit cards will be used throughout the project as a way to keep meetings on track. At any point in later meetings anyone can raise their rabbit and say “Rabbit Hole” indication that the meeting is going off track or that at this point in time we lack the knowledge or expertise to make informed decisions, these conversations can then be tabled for a later date or for when subject matter experts can be brought in to better inform decisions.

Inception

This is an example of the of the radio buttons employed in the design system following an atomic approach. Bing able to instantly pull consistent design components up and modify all of them in a central location help to optimize the workflow.

After the discovery comes the inception process. In this phase we use the information discovered to estimate effort and plan the project timeline.

Design process

The design process start concurrently with the inception. Design needs some lead time to build the design guideline and digest the limitation of the code base.

I took ownership of the design guidelines opting for an atomic approach. This required a lot of work up front to design, maintain and reiterate as the design process moves forward. But allowed me to make sweeping changes across the wire frames later in the design process and saved me weeks in the end.

The clients had a website and a design guideline did exist. However because they had no digital products at this point in time, it was inadequate for our goals. Bringing this to the attention of the marketing and branding team I developed a new design system to accommodate the needs of a digital product. I also pushed heavily to make the new design guidelines accessible. Their product is aimed mostly at older users and as many people get older they are more likely to fall into the category of situationally disabled. Applying general accessibility to the design guideline will greatly improve readability and understanding and lead to greater conversions.

User Tests

A key development point in this project was influencing our client to conduct user tests. These test would help us validate our design approach and allow us to pivot to better anticipate our users needs.

The Hypothesis

After examining the processes and designing a high fidelity end to end prototype. We wanted to test two things;

can a user easily navigate the application process from start to end with no help?
Do users understand the financial concepts employed in this product?

User Test Outcomes

The user tests validated our hypotheses.

Navigation

we found that 75% of testers could navigate from start to end with no assistance. The single friction point was on the declaration page. This page did not use standard user patterns and was flagged before testing. The results of this test gave us the evidence to argue for those changes.
Financial understanding
This financial product is fairly niche, but we still expected that at least 20% of the users would have heard of it in the past. None of our testers had knowledge of this product. The financial concepts within the product were understood by most users with only one exception.

From this user test we uncovered more information around this on boarding process. Particularly around process of the form and the language used. Close to 60% of users noted that this form is quite long, and is fairly repetitive in the information required, We are limited in our solutions for these issues by legal requirements, bu there is an opportunity to refine the language used and cut down or break features out into different onboarding processes.

Refinement

The user test were very helpful in identifying areas of improvement within our designs. With the project owner and business stake holder team we prioritised the changes to be folded into upcoming sprints. Workshops and copy writing sessions were set up to address our largest problem areas.

Challenges

Agile meets waterfall

This financial institution like many other follow a waterfall practice for BAU work. working between the digital product teams that follows agile methodologies and the business team using waterfall lead to unproductive workflows and bottle necks. I became the main conduit of information between both teams which left me very little time to focus on deliverable work. I opted to set up some new rituals between the product owner and the business team to remove myself as a the middle man and open business decisions to the wider group of stake holders and to remove workflow bottle necks.

Design by democracy

This institute had a lack of designers and no design work pathways, to compensate for this they created a design comity made up of representatives of the different stake holder teams. This lead to lot of debate about design with very little recourse to data or best practices. Trying to advocate for the users and bring the knowledge of best design practice was deprioritised in favour for faster production and to reduce workloads in other areas.

Technical Limitations

The finance industry uses a lot of legacy technology, this houses a lot of the back end processes and limits how much change we bring to the product. We are limited by how these existing systems works as they parse the information in the data bases, and this limited our ability to redesign this product to meet the idea time to complete the application process. That being said we were able to reduce the two week process to 15 mins.

Reflections

This project was difficult, and one of my first projects where I was the sole designer. But it did teach me a lot,

It reinforced just how powerful atomic design systems can be when implemented properly, this allowed me to make sweeping changes through the entire onboarding flow by editing our components rather than going through pages individually.
How important setting up sprint rituals are, these allowed not just myself but my entire team to be on the same page and allowed me to connect key stakeholders together to get fast results which improved communication between teams and allowed me to work asynchronously which gave me more time to work and greater flexibility to work on the upcoming priorities.

That being said it also showed me where I have more room for improvement and as I continue to work though the project these are areas I want to improve.

Communication: Between myself and stakeholder but also to reach out to my team for more support when I'm struggling with capacity to work.
Influence: Being able to sit down with stakeholders and easily show them the benefits of working or following certain established user patterns.