With a lack of understanding the current user experience of employees on Client Finance tools, our internal-facing foundational UX team identified potential opportunities to enhance the Client Finance experience by gauging more in-depth feedback from users on the overall blueprint of their journeys, highlighting the pain points, motivations, goals, and needs that the Client Finance team can address within the scope of CF tool functionalities.
Objectives
Understand the current user experience of CF tools to inform improvement opportunities and roadmap priorities.
Identify key experience gap factors across users to ensure diverse, equitable, and inclusive product interactions.
Methodology
We started off by helping the Client Finance team (a mix of 6 directors and senior managers within that domain across the globe) create surveys to gauge the big picture trends in attitudes and behaviors regarding the vast landscape of CF tools. The CF team came to us with their survey drafts and we provided suggestions for improvement, which they implemented. After launching the survey, they came back to us with the results and insights they found. From those insights, I created a qualitative research plan to dig deeper into what we need to better understand through focus groups.
Due to the limit in time and simultaneous need for as much feedback from a variety of people as possible, we opted for running multiple focus groups with users across the globe regarding 6 systems comprising the client finance tool experience. I used Miro boards to facilitate these sessions and ensure everyone invited could provide their feedback.
Common Themes
The following themes were the top-line takeaways we found from our research, which we elaborated on in the tool-specific feedback and used as the foundation for our UX improvement recommendations.
Tool-Specific Feedback
Through thorough analysis and synthesis using Dovetail and organizing the information for presentation on PowerPoint, I presented the tool-specific insights to our Client Finance stakeholders. The insights were divided up by satisfaction & benefits, pain points & challenges, and opportunities. As we walked through these, we had a proactive conversation about the feasibility and scope of the feedback to start determining how we can prioritize roadmap items based on user feedback. Below is an excerpt of the presentation shown to the stakeholders featuring all mentioned Client Finance tools. We chose to use emoticons to emphasize the emotions of our users and importance of empathy in the process of improving the user experience.
Recommendations
Project Outcome/Reflection
We facilitated a roadmap prioritization session following this presentation to proactively encourage widespread conversation on the focus group findings and determine what solutions we could implement in what timespan (e.g. now (within next 3 months), next (3-6 months later), and later (6+ months from now)). This allowed stakeholders to openly express their thoughts on next steps and be on the same page about expectations for the roadmap. This alleviated a lot of pressure and increased morale for the greater Client Finance team and increased their awareness of user experience and the importance of research.
This project was one of those unique experiences where I implemented a lean UX method that I would normally not use on its own because of the depth that 1-1 interviews provide, but given the time constraints and the simultaneous need for a large sample size, the choice to do a large number of focus groups proved to be effective in this case. One of the greatest strengths of a focus group that I was able to see consistently in this study is the transparency across multiple people being able to have discourse on their diverse experiences using the same product and being able to empathize with each other while also getting through any disagreements or differences that come up as they interact. Many of the users commented on how valuable the sessions were, especially in understanding how others experience the same tool differently depending on their role, location, and experience level. If I were given the chance to do it again and had more time, I would definitely incorporate 1-1 interviews and contextual inquiry as well as usability tests - in-person as well if possible since getting that on-location experience expands the understanding of how a user's journey is impacted by their environment.