Holistic Assessment Inspires Product Enhancements
A Centralized Workspace to Promote Oversight and Consistency
Project Overview
As part of an evolving standardized ratings strategy, the application was created to allow for a consistent and simplified analytical process. The ultimate vision was an end-to-end work environment that could continue to evolve. The goal was to create a centralized workspace to enhance internal controls by providing greater transparency to allow for easier supervision by managers who are held accountable to regulators as well as the analyst community. Before embarking on next iteration for product, the team took a step back to access the products current performance.
Challenge: The overarching hierarchy of the product was based on concepts that were new to the user. This made it particularly difficult to articulate interactions and expectations to the user.
Opportunity: Improve user performance by automating mundane tasks allows the user can focus on analyzing the world’s markets, and embedding controls for risk management.
Goal: Reduce the risk of compromised ratings by detecting and preventing potential errors earlier in the process. Prompts to the user confirmed that each requirement has been satisfied, allowing the user and their manager to feel confident that they have complied with these key requirements.
My Responsibilities: As a member of the four-person User Experience Team, I documented the overarching process, connected the process to user flows and the information architecture or the product. I conducted a heuristic analysis of the product and worked with the Business Analysis’s, Product Owners and Development Team to elaborate on user stories as part of the larger SCRUM team.
Deliverables
As part of the new release, the team focused on solving some of the usability problems with the previous release. The UX Design deliverables that were created as part of the new solution included:
Process Flows
Derived from our analytical policies and procedures, the process flow organizes the key requirements of the ratings process.
Information Architecture
Because the product team experienced personnel turnover through out the lifespan of it’s development, unfortunately a comprehensive road map to the product had not been maintained. As a result, it was necessary to take a comprehensive inventory of the product at its current state.
Heuristic Analysis
As part of the recommendations document, enhancements would be proposed based on specific feedback found during usability testing and general user interface improvements would be included based on comparing the product against the established usability principals.
Wire Frames
Some of the findings from the preliminary usability testing indicated problems such as:
- The functionality was difficult to use because it required back and forth “search-find-click-assign” of the parent to child
- There was not a full, step by step view of the entire case and all its related tasks
- There were navigation pain points of the current systems, such as displaying the supporting contextual information in key areas
The wireframes served as a road maps were design to demonstrate the details for future product enhancements. They connected the enhancements and new features to the underlying structure of the existing product in order to address the most pressing usability problems.
Next Steps
- Additional Feature Ideation
The team ideated with the client on enhancements and potential new features. - Develop Additional User Stories for Enhancements
The new features and enhancements were prioritized based on implementation feasibility, budget, user needs. The recommendations for the next release would include enhancements that were proposed based on the research findings and testing outcomes.
