We’re getting closer, one user interview at a time

Written by: Shipra Arora & Robert Paul — April 1, 2018

“You are not the user!” Something that’s been instilled into each and every one of us studying human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s pretty unlikely that you’ll ever design a product or service for just yourself.

“If you want to make a product that will be used by other people, it’s essential to talk to them to discover their wants, needs and, experiences. Interviews help you gain a deeper understanding of people’s behavior and their reason why they do what they do.”

— Nick Babich (UX Planet)

Up until now, we had conducted several analogous user interviews with people in the procure-to-pay space outside of PNC. After months of waiting, and weeks of anticipation and prep building up to this moment, we had finally snagged an opportunity to meet internal PNC clients. Not one, but two! The team’s excitement was off the charts. It’s high time that we met the clients.

Prep 101

1. Have a goal in mind. What is the most important information we want to glean from these interviews?
2. Pick interview methods. Our team wanted to have a traditional interview where we ask participants questions, but we also wanted to spend time observing them use the actual software and doing related work tasks.
3. Curate questions. Because there is only a limited amount of time, it’s important to prioritize the question list in case time runs out.
4. Be ready for not following the interview script. Interviews rarely go exactly as planned. Being prepared for when an interview goes off script is an important part of user research.

Things we learned / should improve in the future:

• Be ready for multiple unscheduled interview participants. Something we didn’t expect going into this user interview was the amount of people that we ended up talking to. We started off by thinking we were interviewing one person. When we arrived at PNC corporate headquarters, we learned that five total people would be attending the interview session, which drastically changed how we approached the situation.
• Send them some questions/content to prepare beforehand. When we asked our interview participants “Is there something we could have done to improve the interview?”, they shared how they wished we had sent them our specific goals and interview questions ahead of time so they could be sure they were the right people to talk to. They mentioned how they could have been better prepared if they had a sense of what was coming.
• We believe a balance of this could work really well. Giving the client a general question outline would have helped to validate that our questions were relevant to their work, or if there were someone better in their department that we could have talked to.
• Research the person you’re interviewing. This is something we wished we would have done. Since the world of banking is so huge, and there’s so many pieces we don’t have domain knowledge on. If we had researched the person we were interviewing, we could have tailored our interview to their specific job role, and achieved better insights.

Preliminary Insights

Some of our initial high-level insights from our interviews are:

Onboarding
Employee onboarding on how to use PNC software is rife with issues. Our interview participants recounted having issues learning everything they needed from the in-person training sessions they participated in. As well, the process in getting set up as a user of the software had gaps where at times they weren’t sure what the next step in receiving access were.

Templates
Employees found having the ability to make templates for their ACH and wire transfers incredibly useful. During the observational part of our session, they showed us the long list of templates they use to make sure that errors are minimized and they can be more efficient in completing their tasks.

Email / phone support
Participants often shared situations in which they need assistance from PNC Client Care support to resolve an issue they are having with PNC software. When asked how frequently they need to reach out to client care they responded, “Not every day, but probably on average three times a week.” This sparked us having more questions. Why do they need help from Client Care this often? What are the kinds of problems they are having? How can these issues be solved through better design?

Next week we are continuing our analysis of all the information we gathered from our interviews and will begin ideating and further developing out our ideas for improving PNC software.

Stay tuned!

“Insights are the dormant truth about an issue, one’s motivation, wishes, or frustration regarding a specific topic.”

— Dan Nessler (UX Director of Hinderling Volkart)

Team Flux