Background
Client: Early-Mid stage financial technology startup.
Project: Create Customer Relationship Management software for products adhering to regulatory work flows, case management and interactions.
Problem
We needed a way for loan managers (agents) and borrower users to interact with each other with regards to regulations, custom cases and workflows.
Understanding the space
Met with subject matter experts to gain their knowledge and identify how we might add clarity to the tools and workflows our users will need to modify the products. Conducted a preliminary competitive analysis to better understand where our product fit and what differentiated us in the space.
I used a couple of notebooks to track questions, details, and ideas for later exploration.
Dug into understanding all the aspects of the products current ecosystem to account for complexities and start to untangle how we might be able to better accommodate our users.
Recreating the existing interfaces while highlighting questions about the upcoming changes and workflows.
Goal
Create a space for agents to interact with borrowers in a regulated manner with easily accessible information to help guide thier actions.
Ideation
The bespoke capabilities of the product allow for maximum flexibility so each section of the CRM needed to be explored while accounting for how we might display them together and seperately.
Ideations of different kinds of progress markers to inform users of their next steps to decide which fit best.
Task distribution exploration, how the agents might be able to figure out what to do next.
Development and Iteration
Worked with developers and product managers to streamline agents workflow with future needs in mind during our MVP development. After testing and learning more from our users we added in more context to help them better understand the events of a case, available search criteria, as well as AI to help summarize cases notes.
Adding in “search by” while looking for borrowers, events under workflow and visual cues to go along with database matches helped add more context for agents.
Testing
We distributed a usability study to be able to better understand our users needs once we had users. After aggregating the responses I presented a top level of what worked well, needed improvement, and ideas for the next steps. Adding information and improving communication were big themes that we caught and acted upon. We added in more context and information to our system, created a newsletter and hired more customer success and onboarding experts to our team to better service our users.
Take Aways
Being able to iterate and develop a platform from pre-users to getting feedback from users was a really satisfying experience. Hearing from them and being able to implement a solution with the combined voices was empowering. I appreciated getting the chance to question my initial assumptions and improve upon ideas and understanding to gain deeper insight into how users interact with interfaces.
Jess Moore 