Convergence I
INTRODUCTION
Just over a year ago I was brought in to assist on a project that at the time was indicated to be a "redesign of the current Investorline experience". At the time, I was certain that this would be a project similar to most redesigns - you are going to pretty up the existing site with few to no alterations. This assumption would be proven very wrong, as a year and change later we have a refined product that has not only built on the existing experience but has taken it hopefully beyond its previous life.
At the start, we began exploring the issue internally with our understanding of what was to be solved and we quickly realized that this would have to be a user informed process. We were required to perform a redesign but precisely what would need to be redesigned and how would we go about doing this? We needed to come up with a way to understand this in a manner that was structured and sustainable in the long term.
To guide ourselves through this understanding we decided upon a few redesign objectives, that would bind this exploration:
1. An Updated Experience
The current Investorline experience has now begun to show signs of aging. This redesign process aims at giving it new life through a full revamp that better updates it to meet today’s best practices and investor expectations.
2. A Client Informed Experience
In order to ensure that Investorline continues to be a product that is widely used, we are taking on a client centric approach to the redesign. This involves heavy inclusion of customer insight throughout the design experience.
3. A Customized & Empowering Experience
As Investorline grows there is a need to personalize the product in a way that allows the individual needs of investors to be more accurately served within the experience. Investors should feel capable and empowered within their journeys.
Using these guidelines, we began the process of our first exploration.
DISCOVERY
To begin investigating the problem at hand, we began an initial round of user interviews. The objective of these sessions was to allow us to gather some initial insights and understandings around what users were currently expecting out of their investing experiences. This would help us understand the current landscape but also what it is that swayed user decisions around who they chose to invest with. These interviews were conducted over a two day period with users representing a wide range of ages, experiences and brokerages.
To facilitate the sessions a wide range of internal users were involved in the interviewing process, with representatives from business,strategy, design and technology all present. This was done to encourage a shared understanding within the internal teams of the problem that was being worked on as well as it allowed team members to hear directly from users what they are expecting out of a final product.
The interviews provided a lot of great insights and validated some of the preliminary ideas we had. They also uncovered a series of new understandings such as the fact that there may be more work to be done than initially expected and that there were several underserved user needs.
In order to solidify and work on these findings, a design sprint was held. While not a conventional time to hold one, the processes and thinking involved in these sprints is ideal for forming a framework for future work. With fresh insights from the sessions, a design sprint was held in two parts with various internal users participating in various capacities. The value of this was immediate, there was a shared understanding of the overall problem as well as an immediate investment by internal teams to work on finding effective solutions.
a few days later, the output of the sprints was a series of ideas and inspirations. In addition to this, personas could now be created and refined with some user data, beyond the user data that had initially been gathered.
With several pieces of this puzzle now manifest, it was proposed that we would create a high level proof of concept. This would act as a starter in the process of creating pieces of work that would all come together to solve the issues that had been identified with the current experience, as well as any new ideas we would then want to incorporate.
Developing the proof of concept involved incorporating a wide range of ideas and consolidating them into a flexible prototype, that could then be refined as more understanding was obtained. This prototype would also serve as a key focal point for the next stage of our process, the Rapid Product Definition (RPD).
RAPID PRODUCT DEFINITION
We had ideas, we had a concept but how would we build and grow what we had now understood? The answer was a Rapid Production Definition workshop.
Over the span of a month, the future team that would work on this redesign initiative, was assembled together in a remote space to begin understanding how we would begin building out our new ideas. Through a series of exercises and workshops, we walked through a roadmap that would form the basis of all future work to be done. This backlog comprised of pieces of work that originated from the proof of concept that had just been created. The goal of doing this was to take apart the ideas that we would need to build and understand how we would refine them over time into their final iterations.
These sessions brought together all team members and allowed everyone an opportunity to provide their insights and expertise on the work that would have to be done. It also allowed everyone to align around an understanding of the work and the future state.
A month later, we were ready to begin work, with a proof of concept that acted as a foundation upon which blocks of work would now be applied to bring it into reality. At the same time, we had a group investment in what was to be done and a clearer understanding of how we were going to go about doing it. From a design standpoint, epics were created within the design team that allowed the discovery - refinement - development flow to be further structured.
To Be Continued…
End the first day of your workshop by explaining how this was a day of information gathering. You were helping the team rally around a main goal and using a series of exercises to support information gathering around that goal. The team is therefore becoming more aligned around the key objectives of the design and is learning about the importance of the UX process in achieving this goal.
PART 2 - FIRST RESULTS & THE ROAD AHEAD
The second day of your workshop should centre around providing simple deliverables based on the information gathered on the previous day. Depending on the exercises conducted you want to provide a few assets that align with that work and demonstrate a cohesion of the ideas generated. In this way you are giving the team an understanding of how a picture can begin to be formed for their redesign initiative. A sample of how the results of each phase could be presented is shown below:
Discuss what you have begun to create and incorporate elements of education into how these are iterative processes that you will continue to perform during the redesign process, each time further refining your outputs. Simple notes about how this can also add overall business value will allow for further buy-in by the team and will encourage a design positive experience.
CONCLUSION
Creating a big picture workshop will allow you to engage your team in a way that they can begin to appreciate what the design process is and how it can help them and the project along. Showing quick results through simple exercises will indicate the efficiency of your process and provide visibility into the importance of each phase in the process. Overall, having a full team onboard with your work as well as onboard with the overall project goal will ensure a streamlined project flow that should generate positive results in time.