THE PROBLEM

Because of the difficulty of the company’s current app experience, data input in order to create projections for a financial advisor’s client’s financial readiness for their future has become cumbersome and usually leads to fall-offs in terms of app usage of the financial advisor or fall-offs from their customers.

KICK-OFF AND WORKSHOP

Learning more about the financial advisors, the business, and the problem.

I conducted a single data workshop where we talked about the team’s problems and how they interpreted the data that they gathered that lead them to their conjectures. We did activities such as empathy mapping, post-ups, mock-interviews , user and customer goals and tasks walk-throughs, discussing their pain-points and further expounding on the concepts, to simulate what it's like to be in the shoes of their users and customers and we also used the time in assessing what we will be doing next.

HEURISTIC EVALUATION

I conducted a methodical review of their current application’s experience and compared it against usability heuristics and standards to find opportunities for improvement.

The heuristic evaluation section of the document provides a description of the actual heuristic being tested and a quick over-all summary of how the application fairs to the standard. The document also breaks down each section to show more specific evidence of why a heuristic's score has fallen. After a brief description of the reasoning, the document also provides recommendations on how to improve the issues. This recommendation worked as a way for our team to communicate what was needed for the application. A final heuristic score was given after the evaluation and is based on the level of compliance on each heuristic item. The heuristic score looks at fundamental concepts that encompass the entire application and not just components and provides a quantitative view of how the system performs in terms of usability standards.

VISUAL DESIGN EXPERT ANALYSIS

After reviewing the fundamentals, the problem was also discovered on how they use their design to help perception and cognition for users to have an easier experience in completing app-based tasks.

This section in the document provides information on what components of the application could use an overhaul in the visual design. The document talks about how visual design can be utilized to exploit human tendencies through cognition and perception and how visual cues improve the overall experience of a user because of the improved rate of consuming information. 

UI AND USABILITY REVIEW

Interaction and general usability conventions were also reviewed and provided with recommendations.

This section discusses how their application can improve the over all user experience by utilizing standards and best practices for particular interaction elements being used in the application. This section provides explanations on why a UI element might be used incorrectly and recommends ways to approach solving the problem.

IN-DEPTH RECOMMENDATIONS

I provided larger experience recommendations such as quick-entry modes and better ways to navigate hundreds of input fields to address fundamental pain-points of users.

This section provides visual ideas of how the application can be improved. Each example tackles a particular concept in the design of the application that can solve issues present in the legacy version. From simple visual design ideas, to more complex fundamental recommendations on changing structures and architecture, this section attempts to provide enough information for the client to know the priorities on what aspects of the redesign needs more attention, and why these improvements are going to be beneficial to their application and the experience of their users.

EXPERIENCE BRIEF

The idea: Remove the front-load data input before the projection and have both side by side. As the user inputs data, a fraction of the projection can be calculated and displayed.

So much of the work is done upfront before anything can be calculated. There is no clear value to how much data input is needed to ensure a more accurate projection, that is why we think the users work less in updating their system or postpone it and have their assistants do it for them (all aside from the UX/UI problems that could be solved at this point). If the user knows that each data point actually contributes to the prediction, then the likelihood of user engagement is higher. And as a bonus, since the chart is being built each time an input field is filled, the user and their customers can easily determine how to read the projection as they work with it from an empty state to a full state.

ONLY FOUR DAYS TO PROTOTYPE

With the data input experience, side-by-side with the projection builder, the financial advisor could feel the value of the work that they are doing and their customers could start learning how to read the projection from simple to complex at the same time.

After the evaluation, we were given just about 4 days to produce a wireframe prototype of an idea that came out of the heuristic. This was a challenge, but I've managed to create an entire narrative that would demonstrate the new and improved experience of their application. The original application required the user to put all their financial information in one go before any kind of analysis was given. We suggested the approach to be more conversational, and use progressive disclosure on the first parts or building the graph and onboarding the user to the application.

The experience starts off with the financial advisor going through a series of client-onboarding questions that ask simple and approachable questions to ease their clients into the experience. As they add these data points, the chart on the right would then slowly start building with additional data points. This would give the financial advisor motivation to keep adding more granular data points to their user’s financial profile as they see the value it is adding to the accuracy and specificity of the model on the right. At the same time, their customers wouldn’t have to dive in and be overwhelmed with multi-variate data graphs about their future projections as they would be along for the ride with their advisors from the time the graph gets built from it’s simplest form to it’s most powerful levels.

HAPPY CUSTOMER, NEW S.O.W.

After this engagement, the client saw the value of design thinking in helping them find solutions to their problems and continued to have new projects with me. The next project was all about creating a powerful visualization tool tailored for their users.

DATA VISUALIZATION GUIDE

I created a visualization interface guide to express the different features the interaction can do.

LOOKING AT THE FUTURE, SOLUTIONS BEYOND THE UI

Ideating on what else the client can do to improve the experiences can give them ideas on what to tackle next.

These ideas focused on taking out the requirement for separate input experiences and having the main visual as the primary interaction point, while utilizing other hardware experiences to enrich how different users would use the service.