Our tactical users need an efficient way to find the details needed to do their everyday jobs. They need to find specific information on their financial data, user information, actionable items and help when needed. They need a simple, consolidated system that can anticipate their needs so they don’t have to waste time looking for what should be simple, easy-to-find information and can instead focus on their every-day duties.
Research Plan
In order to understand client expectations and explore their needs, pain points, and priorities, I wrote a up a research plan to follow through the lifecycle of the project. This included 4 parts: Internal, Client, Competitive Research and Iterative Usability Testing.
Design Thinking Workshop
To gather as much input as I could from the people that know the customer, I held a small workshop with my scrum team and then a larger one with approximately 20 Internal Stakeholders ranging from Customer Service agents, Trainers, Client Advisors, Treasury Managers, Product Managers, Developers and UX Designers.
• I wrote the invitations and did the recruiting with input from my Product Owner. • I planned and scripted the 4-hour workshop utilizing design thinking exercises which included: Abstraction Laddering, Statement Starters, Creative Matrix, Importance/Difficulty Matrix, Concept Poster and Critique • I facilitated the 4-hour workshop and recruited a co-facilitator to assist.
Interviews and Structured Observation
In order to understand customer expectations, needs, pain points, and priorities I felt it was imperative that we sit down to interview and observe the clients in their natural settings.
• With the assistance of my Product Owner, we came up with a list of potential clients to talk with. • I wrote and sent out recruiting the emails and follow-ups for scheduling • I planned and scripted each interview • I lead and co-facilitated each interview with the assistance of my Product Owner
Persona Creation
Based on the user interviews, and internal research, I was able to create a persona of our primary target user to utilize for the project going forward.
Product Vision
By utilizing all the information we’ve gathered thus far, I was able to synthesize all this information into creating a product vision and subsequent list of desired features and functionality for the product.
Product Roadmap
Once we had our list of features and functions, I was able to lead my scrum team and product stakeholders in several workshops in order to synthesize this into a product roadmap that could be used to create the product backlog and subsequent user stories.
Storyboarding
From here, I was able to move on to storyboarding in order to visually map out some of the main workflows and tasks we now know our users are involved in.
Design Inspiration
In order to “think outside the box” and try to innovate in the banking space, we decided to do out of industry design research to see how other industries are handling their search functionality. I gathered input from my team for ideas of industries to look at, grabbed all the screen shot, then brought in other team members to give their input on what was appealing or troublesome in the examples we found.
Interface Sketching
As a first step to wire framing, I created interface sketches based on the out of industry inspiration and storyboarding in order to solve our users biggest problems.
Wireframes
Wireframes were created to start getting closer to what the user interface may look like and to start getting more direct feedback from team members and stakeholders.
Mockups and Prototypes
Mockups were created in order start gathering feedback, test and refine. The end goal is to allow our users to search, display and utilize a complex amount of information in a simple and intuitive way that allows them to complete the jobs they need to get done with as little friction as possible while providing valuable data visibility and insight.
