Background
Fundportal is the current product I am working on, the product has been developed 4 years ago based on pinpoints and experience of the Edgefolio founder during his years on the Hedge Fund industry, the current solution was not user centered, it simply was developed and grew organically. The ideal is to digitise most of the processes and create a centralized tool (Portal) a Manager can use to manage and promote a Fund.
Our users
Fund managers
Main objective is to attract investors to their fund, they need to maintain a contact list which can be managed, however this is all manual work and still on spreadsheets, therefore the security is quite poor and not compliant. The only way to track people’s activities is through the email.
Confidential Information about the fund performance is sent by a taylored emails and some of the files are quite large with mainly data, quite boring to interact with.
Investors
Get tones of emails from various Funds Managers in order to get interest and eventually invest. However they could easily lose track and get annoyed with so many emails.
The problem
The overall problem was the product, as by solving one issue we created new ones, it is not easy to use for the Manager, lots of the functionalities are confusing, there are a lot of workarounds. Hard to learn first time and the journeys are not clear. All the these has created users to disengage and to complain on the features.
The goal
The idea is to digitise processes such as Campaigns, document repository, User activity, GDPR, automate calculation on Fund performance and centralise them on a portal where Fund Managers can invite potential investors and share any information about the fund based on permission and strategy.
Simplify all the journeys, make the product more intuitive, create stickiness by providing dashboards and interactive graphs, build trust between the managers and the product. Make the portal the main tool for their daily work and more important make users happy when interacting with the portal.
Lean UX process
Since the product was already developed, we needed to establish the various channels of feedback to understand our users and the areas that needed to be prioritised.
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We had all the support tickets
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Feedback thorough sales team
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Intercom a tool which monitors users interactions
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Inbuilt logs to monitor users actions
Challenge 1- Project Management tool
My team was not used to Sprints, neither we had a tools to help us manage our projects and the roadmap which we needed to get organised and have momentum objectives
So I took the initiative to look for a project management tool ‘Monday’ that will help us get in shape.
Challenge 2 - Design Sprints
Another challenge was the luck of understanding of my responsibilities and the process I needed to follow in order to come with possible solutions to the issues identified, i looked for the most simple process to follow design sprint and design process and kept reminding my team what was involved in each step so that they can give me some time to explore and be creative.
Research
Overview of feedback channels
Once all the information was collected from the feedback channels mentioned above, we began to identify patterns, those became the persistent issues our users kept asking for support or fixes.
Results: Patterns which help us identify and group users issues.
Call interviews
Having more background about the user was important to understand what problem we were trying to solve, and if there was a problem in the first place. I set up a list of questions that would help me and the team get more knowledge about:
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User background
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Mental model, motivation and frustration
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Business background
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Processes in place
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Marketing process
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Data Analysis
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Contact management
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Pinpoints
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And why this product was beneficial to them
Results: This was a really good exercise as i could connect with users, build up a relationship, they really felt parf of the project.It was really good to prioritise those features based on the users needs. Great ideas came out from this exercise that we considered working later on.
List of items to work on were prioritised as follows:
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Manage users
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Communication
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Analysis
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User profile
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UI Update
Product walk through
Sympathising with the users was only possible if I was in their place, i looked at the journeys they had to follow in order to perform a task on Fundportal.. I spend a day going through each piece of work listed above, asked the developers to explain why certain decision were made, the later helped me step back and see the the boundaries of the product and limitation of the resources available
Results:
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Identify the problems
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Identify he Goals
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Simplification of uster stories and journeys - Image here sketch file
Challenge: Manage users
Brief
The way journey was designed was very confusing to the Managers and painful to the investor.
Managers will have to send an invite via email, only when the investor accept that invitation the manager will have to approve it and then a record of the investor will be created. If a manager has more than one fund there will be multiple email invites. There was no way a manager could just create an account without sending an email.
Managers are limited of functionality when it comes to manage contacts, sorting, exporting, filtering therefore the functionality is quite rigid.
Current Manage access
New Manage access
Goals
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Give more control to the manager on contact management
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Simplify the process of creating user accounts
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Stop sending emails after an account is created
Benefit
Qualitative
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Improve user trust
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Reduce confusion on journeys
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Provide options to complete a task
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Make it easy to use
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Allow manage to have more control
Quantitative
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Reduce the amount of emails sent to the users to 1
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Increase the number of investors on their portal
Secondary research
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I started by a walk through the Manager user functionality, I have gone and tried all the journeys a user can do in order to understand the pinpoints
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Collected all the data about the users in order to structure the information and be more meaningful to the users.
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Understand the technical structure of the application
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Talked to the real users to get feedback.
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Looked at other systems to see how they are managing contacts (Slack, Asana, invision)
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Brainstorming sessions with the tech team
Results
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Access invite from ‘Manage access’ , ‘Email new investor’
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Review duplicated functionality such as ‘Invite investor’, ‘Email new investor’ and merge them to become the new communication
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Restructure information architecture
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Simplify the journeys and functionalities such as creating an investor account/ uploading bulk/ the ability to manage data (sort/ edit/ filter/ search)
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Solved multiple emails being sent to the user
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Allow contacts to be managed independently from communication
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A simpler UI
User journey - Fundportal
Sketch
Having all journeys simplified I began to sketch them and discuss them with the Tech team to see how realistic and the impact to the current infrastructure of the application.
Prototyping
New UI, it felt time to give a fresher look to the application, iconography - to simplify and save us time I have borough the icons library from Material design, by doing this I reduced the dependency between developers and design as they can download the icons as they work along and I focus on other tasks. See prototypes
Test / Feedback loops
During the redesign I had also changed some micro interactions to make the user journey much easier, to probe the correct one I run A/B test, preference tests and design tests.I felt that this was a great way to backup the decisions made as the feedback collected was positive as well as very constructive.
Build
Getting all in place for the Development team for the sprint 1