UX Research - Understanding Financial Services Processes

From Spring 2018 to Summer 2019, I played a lead role on a small team of UX researchers working on a contract to optimize loan processing at a large financial organization.

I conducted stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiries, and workshops to document tasks/flows, personas, pain points, workarounds, and improvement opportunities. The result was a series of readouts and a recommendations report that included current and proposed future state journey maps.

Pre-Interview Surveys, Stakeholder Interviews, & Application Walkthroughs

As contractors coming in cold to the organization, we leaned on our main on-site contact to provide us with a list of users we were authorized to interview, as well as some preliminary information about the systems and applications they used to complete their work on a day-to-day basis. We used a pre-interview questionnaire to capture first impressions about their work and these productivity tools prior to officially conducting our stakeholder interviews, so we could tailor our questions and empathize more with the users’ pain points.

Fun fact - we were given an initial list of 12 different applications and systems to include in the survey as potential tools the respondents might indicate that they use, but we also included an “other” option and let them fill in the blank. As we received more responses, this number organically grew to over 25! So many tools to centralize and reconcile, so little time…

Armed with the information we collected from the surveys, we conducted in-person and remote stakeholder interviews to dig in and learn more about the client and empathize with users’ needs. As many of the systems they were using sounded like they were technically complex, we scheduled application walkthroughs to get a basic familiarity with the interface and purpose of each one so we could be prepared for the upcoming contextual inquiries.

Excerpt from pre-interview questionnaire

Contextual Inquiries, Personas, & Workshop

As with the stakeholder interviews, we conducted in-person and remote contextual inquiries to watch each user perform the tasks associated with their role. Some of these lasted 15 minutes and others went on for up to 6 hours!

From here, we mapped together a flow of processes for each user and determined how each user role transferred their work to the next role in the journey. This enabled us to start to put together personas.

Realizing we needed to fill in some more gaps and truly see what the needs were from department to department as each user did their part in processing the loan, we conducted a collaborative in-person workshop (don’t you miss those???) where we had stakeholders work across departments to validate the journey we had created and discuss what they needed from each other. It ended up being the first time some of those departments had ever interacted with one another in person!

At the end of the workshop, we had filled the walls of the room with tasks, pain points, and opportunities for improvement, and everyone had an opportunity to share out.

I like to keep stakeholders guessing by constantly changing my hair color.

Putting it All Together: The Journey

With such great participatory feedback from our stakeholders, the recommendations report basically wrote itself. To accompany that report, we also created a current state journey map, as well as a proposed future state journey map (pictured at the top of this screen.) And fortunately for us, we were invited back to be the designers of record as the agile teams were stood up to start to tackle the future state.