Before we dive deeper, here is some context. A company is a Silicon Valley technology startup that enables organizations to make more informed and confident decisions based on coherent data. The focus is on major financial institutions and banks, helping them in risk management by providing the ability to verify internal prices against independent third-party sources and delivering more insights based on their data.
There is already a major player in the field - our competitor. Most banks are comfortable working with them. However, approximately 1.5 years ago, regulators began sending emails indicating that at some point in the future, it will be required to use 2 solutions to verify internal prices.
Business goal: Become the most adopted second solution. Then - become the biggest solution in the field.
My goal: Create an easy-to-use and meaningful flow for a complex analytical system.
Initially facing challenges with unclear user understanding, communication, and a complex domain, we iterated through
various attempts, including changing the calculation methodology, disclosing more data, and finally creating a comprehensive analytical tool. It led to the first significant win and garnered interest from other companies.
During the year of development, the new product owner and my team streamlined the development processes. I became a team lead and was responsible for the UX team. My team took full responsibility for the requirement and design stages, having a chance to research the users. This allowed us to make more user-centric decisions.
What were the complications when I joined the product:
And it’s now an overreaction. Designing a platform for finance guys with PhDs providing complex calculations and analysis is not a piece of cake. My personal challenge.
There were other issues as well:
Lack of understanding in the team about who our users are, and the problems they face. No direct access to users
Only one subject matter expert in the company who understands the domain
No product owner, leading to a lack of communication between teams
No straightforward process, no clear requirements, and no backlog
That’s how it felt. Nevertheless, I started to dive in.
Remember this popup. At first, it contained all the additional information we were providing to clients, essentially resembling a copy of our competitor’s functionality. Sales regularly held meetings with potential customers, and at this point, the feedback was mainly positive, but it wasn't translating into sales.
We realized that the initial hypothesis about what banks needed was incorrect. They didn’t actually need the same product they already had just because regulators said so.
Also, every methodology change requires a heavy analysis before jumping into mockups.
When the calculation methodology was clear we started building a design that would reflect the methodology in an easy-to-understand way. There was a lot of new data we needed to show that we just basically created (our data analysts created a number of metrics that didn’t exist on the market before).
It was a step in the right direction but it still wasn’t enough.
Some of the inventions were interesting to clients, they were happy to see more data. But mostly the new methodology was hard to digest and was not adding value. At least we started moving away from the competitor and began thinking about users’s needs that are not covered yet.
Two important people — a business analyst and a product owner — joined the company. One of the issues was solved: we started to elicit better requirements and communication between teams arose.
At this point, my team lead left and appointed me as a new team lead. I had 2 other designers and one business analyst on the team. The product owner and I started shaping the development process and formed a backlog.
In parallel, I finally had a chance to learn more about the domain and our users. Although direct access to users was still not available, we had other newcomers — subject matter experts. I conducted interviews with them and discovered who the users were, what they did, why they did their work, and what their workflow looked like (at least as our SMEs described it). This allowed me to compile user personas, Customer Journey Maps (CJM), and other artifacts for further use, and the domain started to shape.
We could make more informed decisions designing the product as we now understood how our product would potentially fit into the customer's world.
In terms of creating design, we had to iterate quickly. We were able to build designs rapidly without wireframes, leveraging our extensive base of different screens and components. Complex flows, ready for feedback, could be carried out in a week. But then we had to clean mockups to eliminate discrepancies in colors, sizes, and components used. The design system was old and didn’t meet our needs. We were detaching a lit. There was a lack of stability in outcomes drove me to start expanding the design system.
Selected Components
At this stage, the whole product vision has changed. We didn’t want to compete with other price verification tools anymore. As we figured out verifying prices is just a small part of a long flow, where users have a bunch of other tasks that they do in other systems, excel spreadsheets, and even emails. What if we could combine all these tasks in one place?
Users need not only outliers identification but an analytical tool for the whole data they have. Outliers were no longer important.
One more round of iteration. The methodology has changed once again. It became easier to understand and closer to market standards. We came up with a module that would allow users to analyze the uploaded data from different points of view.
Feature Evolution
It was a success: One more round of feedback and we started to receive overwhelmingly positive responses to the new module, but some of the banks were still not sure about the methodology.
Some small changes here and there. Adding third-party data became a pivotal moment. My team cleaned up the flow and made it more streamlined.
Here is the whole evolution from a small pop-up to a comprehensive analysis module. It took approximately a year from the first change to the first client. The reason is that customers evaluate our solution based on the data we give them and the analytics we provide based on their own data. To give this data and analytics we need to process it first. It requires development.
When I left, the company was on the home straight with one other bank and expected to sign them as well.
Several banks with whom we lost contact a while ago have resumed conversations with us. They are now interested in what we are doing, and the team has started to regularly attend client meetings where they can better understand users' needs.
We attracted a few banks that were not interested in our solution previously. They are now ready to evaluate it.
A complete flow
Any feedback is better than no feedback. We haven't had the opportunity to conduct traditional tests like usability testing, but we were still seeking any kind of feedback.
In B2B, there might be a few significant clients whose requests have to be met. We need to adapt the platform to meet those clients' needs without negatively impacting everyone .
The team is the main strength in turbulent projects. Developing warm, trusting relationships will pay off one hundred times.
Ksenia Gorobuk
Warsaw, Poland