Project Brief
Develop a modern and high quality application that will solve users pain points, boost their performance and increase the return of investment for the company.
Through user centered design and development processes we aim to increase customer satisfaction through the utility, ease of use, automation that will result in less manual processing and efficiency provided through the interaction with the new application.
Goals
Single Source of Truth
For all the information related to the area
Efficient
To allow the users to perform their daily activities in a timely manner helping them achieve their business goals.
Flexible
From the user’s perspective the app must allow them to view information according to each users needs.
From an engineering perspective the app must be designed in a way that will easily allow future business changes.
Robust Reporting
That will allow the users to slice and dice data to create new reports in a flexible way or run existing canned reports whenever they need to.
Scalable
Ensure the application is designed and developed in a way that can handle a large increase in users, workload or transactions without undue strain.
Auditable
Must keep relevant records to provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific operation inside the application.
The Team
The core team was composed by 30 members including business analysts, software architects, developers, testers and me as the principal product/UX designer.
My Role
I worked closely with the PO to define the product roadmap. Worked with the PO to Plan and prioritize product feature backlog and development for the product. Defined and execute the user research effort. Define and drive the product and user experience design strategy for McKinsey's most important project. Encourage and lead the team to pursue a user centered design approach in all the steps of the product development. Owned the entire UX process: UX research, user interviews, personas creation, wireframes and mockups design, prototyping, user testing. Owned requirements gathering sessions with business stakeholders and users from UX perspective. Requirements analysis, management and communication. Manage the design presentations to business stakeholders. Owned the creation of all the artifacts needed by the development team such as: UI guidelines, prototypes to enforce requirement understanding, animated prototypes to easily communicate functional and interactive elements. Lead the user stories grooming sessions. Provide backlog management in collaboration with the PO and user stories creation and prioritization. UI Reviews Worked closely with the TECH and QA team to ensure the functionalities were developed as per the business requirements and as per the quality expected. Worked closely with the PO, the Delivery Manager, the Scrum Master and Tech Leads to define the project delivery plan.
Research & Analysis
I planned and conducted the research strategy. Qualitative and quantitave data was gathered through surveys and interviews to potentials users around the world.
Through our research we identified user needs/requirements, usage patterns, etc.
The effort was focused initially to our specific project, but then expanded, to attend the needs of the whole Finance Cloud Transformation effort.s
As part of the effort we documented business processes so that we could easily identify pain points and opportunity areas.
Design Patterns and Guidelines
As part of the design phase I created a design system to ensure consistency throughout all designs. The skin of the different design elements was later replaced once the Firm's new brand image was available
Since it was a data intensive product it became fundamental to enable the users to manipulate data freely. So the interaction patterns related to data manipulation were carefully defined and tested with the users:
Prototyping
Once the user journeys were defined, I worked on initial wireframes to try out different approaches. For 2 to 3 of them I created clickable prototypes so that the specific process could be tested early by the busines users. That way we could iterate and improve designs before presenting them to business stakeholders and then share them to the development team.
Key Results
Achieved a 84% score that placed us within the Top 5 of apps within the Firm. Increased team’s collaboration and communication resulting in ~2 hours less spent on back and forths. Increased team’s efficiency by reducing ~5 hours of work per week. Increased app usage and adoption by 20%. Reduced 90% the need of Training Sessions.
Users Feedback after Production Release
"System looks great and quite easy to follow. Very helpful"
“Amazed at all the new functionality the application has over the previous one”
“Amazed and pleased with SSO, searches, real time data, etc”
“The application will be a big help since it gives me all the information I need”
“The new application is GREAT is gives me all that I need and is so easy to use”
“Huge step forward”
“I am amazed”
"Thanks for creating such an excellent tool, with so many useful features and the flexibility to manage the changes that could occur over the next few years as the Firm grows and evolves.”
“Job well done by all!!!!! I LOVE the new application”