As a UX Professional, I champion strategic design thinking in the projects I work on. Popularized by the British Design Council in 2005, the Double Diamond Model is a proven strategy that can take a development team efficiently from start to finish.
Configuration Tool
Discover
At FIS, an internal team was responsible for onboarding client financial institutions to their digital product suite. This process was conducted by manually entering data into an extremely large Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with over 30,000 rows of data. This process would take ~1200 hours total before the client was able to utilize the product suite.
Interviewing members of this team, it was clear that this was a frustrating process. The use of an Excel spreadsheet led to numerous input errors, prevented proper collaboration between team members, and overall took too much time to get clients started.
Define
After interviewing internal team members, analyzing the existing process, and communicating with project management, we came up with the following requirements for the Configuration Tool:
Create a brand new application for client configuration
Reduce client onboarding time by a significant number of hours
Complete a usable tool within an aggressive timeline
Develop
Development had a major impediment: I was the sole UX Designer on a development team with an immature understanding of what user centered design truly entailed. In a perfect world, we could have conducted far more end user research, created user personas, and work from low fidelity conceptual wireframes to high fidelity mockups and prototypes. Despite many of these steps being expedited or bypassed, I was still able to design in an iterative process.
Analyzing the original Excel spreadsheet-called “the workbook” among the target team of users-we identified roughly 15 categories to act as a high level navigation structure. We then looked at the type of data inputs and found a corresponding form component to be used rather than a raw input of data (ex. a radio button for binary options, instead of manually entering Y/N, Yes/No, 1/0).
Deliver
Conducted in two week sprints, we would create a high fidelity mockup to hand to developers along with a design specification document, highlighting the specific components and stylings to user per the companies design framework. The developers would then spend the next sprint creating the web pages, and the team would review what was made to ensure it met requirements. Finally, the next sprint would be a demo of the current state development to project management and stakeholders. If the demo did not receive approval, the team would circle back to the beginning of the cycle.
Back Office Modernization
Discover
FIS created a case management application that was in need of an update. Used by back office employees of financial institutions and banks, the application allowed access to various details of a customer and their related account details. Web design standards have changed significantly since the launch of the application, and it’s dependence on unsupported web browsers created a prime opportunity to undergo a modernization effort
Define
Requirements came from the internal product team that conducted the majority of communication with clients.
Update the UI to the modern design system
Maintain the same user flows and work process, do not deviate from what the clients are used to doing
Identify gaps in the modern design system and create solutions to be added to the design component library
Maintain a similar visual style between companion applications
Develop
As the lead UX Designer, I was responsible for analyzing the legacy application and creating a modernized mockup of the various webpages. If there was not a component in the library for an important aspect of the legacy tool, then I would work on designing potential solutions that could be added to the library. I was also responsible for collecting feedback from QA testers if there was a usability issue that needed to be resolved, and I would subsequently work with the engineering team to ensure it was resolved in an appropriate manner for the user.
As the project went on, it became apparent that there was a need for a full on redesign, despite not having support for such an effort. In order to pitch the importance of a redesign, I also conducted a heuristic evaluation of both the legacy application and the in-progress modernized application, using a method called the UX Scorecard created by another designer on a different project. The scorecard showed that 37% of users found the application to have a confusing layout and poor visual design. I also conducted interviews with internal employees familiar with the application to collect additional data and corroborate what was discovered in the heuristic evaluation.
Deliver
Due to the number of web pages in the legacy application (1600+ screens), common patterns were identified and compiled into a “template.” This template would contain the modernized UI layout and changes and could be applied across multiple pages, rather than design each page screen by screen. The final result was 20 design templates that were used to modernize the application.