Find Out Fast

Challenge

Financial services and investing company, SEI was developing a new service to help partners build and manage their business operations. They wanted a way to automate tracking of operational tasks and share the best practices for their industry.

A small pilot program was underway to determine market needs. Using data collected from the pilot, the client identified internal scaling as a key area for success.

My Role

Working with the product and operations teams, I lead a series of workshops to identify how we might support a larger number of future customers.

I created high fidelity prototypes, and conducted user tests. Using feedback from testing I iterated and improved the product design. Our findings were presented to the senior management for budget and resource approval.

Workshop

I love design thinking frameworks. For this project, I used a modified activities from the The Design Sprint. I had the team generate ideas though diverge-and-converge activities then qualify the results with by voting for the top priorities.

As a group, we created a hybrid storyboard/customer journey, then mapped the top solutions to corresponding points on the journey. This helped us see the complete story of how someone might engage with the service.

The workshops lead us to create a marketing site to test our messaging and a native app to test our proposed features.

Marketing

I asked each team member to share a lighting demo with the group. First, they researched existing products to find inspiration for our project. Then they presented the parts they found inspiring and discussed how we could uses similar ideas in our product. Using what we learned, everyone then worked on sketches for our marketing site.

I distilled the group’s contributions to write copy and create a UI, resulting in a site that we then presented to our testers.

App

To find to the most valuable features to test, I had the team write down everything they could think of on Post-it notes and put them on the whiteboard. We organized and voted to find the most important features. The Features with most votes judged on an effort vs impact kano-style scale and prioritized for testing. The remaining ideas were added to a backlog for later iterations.

Using the highest impact features I created an MPV app prototype. This prototype was presented to our testers to determine task completion difficulty and overall satisfaction.

Testing

We ran in-person and remote tests. Our script brought users though the journey of discovering the product and using the app. We collected notes and compiled them into a matrix to judge the effectiveness of the product.

I compiled the results and delivered recommendations to the team. We used a similar voting system, then I iterated on the site and prototype based on what we learned.

Results

Within two months the client had a market tested direction for their product. When presenting the proposal to senior management, we were able to share both qualitative and quantitative proof that there is a market for the product and a viable solution for the business.