Theme 2
Siloed communication and information sharing between departments have a significant impact on the users due to misaligned strategic goals and governance of the system and content.
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The goal of this project was to optimise a major internal web portal (herein referred to as AdviserSuite in order to conserve the client’s anonymity) which is heavily relied on by various types of users like financial advisers and the people who support them in order to make it easier and more efficient to manage their practices and to serve clients across Africa more effectively with numerous financial products.
I joined Phase 1 of the project which consisted of 2 teams working concurrently:
My responsibilities include planning, executing, and delivering the research alongside Branden, the team lead, as well as introducing UX concepts and methodologies that helped to develop the strategic and design recommendations.
Proposed flight plan for Team 1:
Note: Due to unforeseen challenges with recruiting participants and project scope creep, the deadline was extended which afforded us an extra week to finish the project.
Conventional travel apps don't consider the unique needs of digital nomads, who require relevant and up-to-date information that is tailored to people who live abroad. These people need a product that can integrate into their mobile lifestyles to make it easier and more enjoyable to live and work abroad.
We started by immersing ourselves in existing expertise and findings in order to gain business context and understand the problem space more clearly to inform the next phases of our research.
We noticed early on that Stream 2 did not have enough information available to them to make effective design decisions and recommendations. Therefore, we ensured that we worked in a way that allows us to share pertinent research findings as they come in order to enable the design team with an Agile methodology.
Next, the product owner helped us to schedule semi-structured remote interviews with 9 stakeholders including client executives, the AdviserSuite team, engineering, auxiliary product owners, and various SMEs.
These interviews provided valuable insights into stakeholders' goals, concerns, and pain points with the AdviserSuite portal hypothesised by the stakeholders
Our research process was as follows:
Siloed communication and information sharing between departments have a significant impact on the users due to misaligned strategic goals and governance of the system and content.
There is a need for clearer and more controlled inter-departmental processes that ensure more effective systems are created and maintained for users in the client’s ecosystem.
The information architecture of the portal is widely regarded as the biggest pain point which is believed to negatively affect the user experience for various user groups.
Through discussions with the stakeholders we identified the following measures of success for the client team as a whole:
Next, we commenced user research by crafting a user research plan and preparing for the research by recruiting participants and preparing the research space with the following research goals and objectives:
In the end, we were able to source a sample of 23 participants that were sourced from the client's teams with help from the product owner on the basis of their roles, tenure, and gender as laid out in the recruitment matrix with a primary focus given to the advisers who use the Adviser Suite platform.
4 Distinct adviser groups, Personal assistants
Adviser Suite support staff, Administrators
Due to unforeseen challenges in recruiting participants, the recruitment matrix was greatly simplified to accommodate our constraints while still staying true to the diversity of users identified in the first part of our research.
By leveraging a triangulated research approach, we are able to draw more reliable conclusions from our study by utilising three different research methods to cross-validate the findings:
The survey was made available on the Adviser Suite platform and covered questions about the participant’s role and ways of working, their physical and technical environments, needs and pain points, and several benchmarking user experience questions.
This survey reached 310 users in various user groups which resulted in a 95% confidence level with a 5% margin of error.
An unforeseen code freeze in engineering delayed the creation of the survey component that I created for the Adviser Suite portal by 1 week forcing us to run the interview studies concurrently and use the survey results as an independent source of information.
The research project was exploratory in nature which lead me to design an observational study that aims to learn about how users use the AdviserSuite platform in their day-to-day lives without the biases and constraints of a questionnaire.
Due to location constraints, the study had to be conducted virtually over MS Teams which meant that we were not able to do a purist observational study. Therefore, I recommended that we prepare 4 short exploratory tasks to learn about the user’s environments, behaviours, and sentiments in a naturalistic way:
By using the questions and hypotheses that came up during the observation study, we created a protocol for remote semi-structured one-on-one interviews with users to validate these findings and to gain a deeper understanding and inform the learning goals.
These interviews allowed us to gain a much deeper and holistic understanding of the user and problem space with interesting correlations coming out of our discussions with participants.
After transferring our findings from our observation and interview study capture sheets to Miro, we started synthesising the data to draw insights through thematic analysis:
Ensuring validity in qualitative research by leveraging the foremost method recommended to extract reliable patterns and themes from qualitative data as shown by Braun and Clarke.
Benefits:
This approach offers benefits such as accessibility, reduction of bias, iterative data analysis, data set clarification and exhaustive analysis.
Limitations:
The research approach is limited in that it is time-consuming, reduces complex data to phrases, requires validation, and may not be representative of the population.
Ways to mitigate limitations:
By using a triangulated research approach and interrater reliability, we were able to produce more reliable research results.
After careful consideration, we constructed 3 main themes through all our research findings which were illustrated in a research report alongside various artefacts like task flows to produce actionable insights that can be used by the client and future design teams.
Areas that we reported on:
After careful consideration, 3 key themes emerged from the research sessions conducted with primary and secondary users of the Adviser Suite portal:
Efficiency is seen as a driving factor to becoming a successful adviser. Efficient processes and quality service is needed in order to build rapport and instil trust in their clients.
Users' work is complex and time consuming, therefore simplifying processes and systems is vital to achieve a better user experience.
User interactions with the Adviser Suite portal is shaped by task centric and self-taught behaviours.
After creating a research report containing all our findings and recommendations, we presented our findings to stakeholders. This session was very successful as the stakeholders were happy that we were able to answer questions that they had about their users and the portal for such a long time as well as the depth of insights we were able to provide.
Next, we presented our research findings to the other designs teams both internally and contractors, who were relying on these findings to implement future changes and improvements to the Adviser suite portal.
The report was seen as very helpful to these design teams and is still being circulated around the company to this day where various other teams like marketing and people teams are able to use our research to create a better experience for many more people in the client space.