Goal

Modernize 10+ year-old proprietary software to improve employee satisfaction and task efficiency within the Bank

My role

Interview recruitment, facilitation and analysis, persona building, journey mapping

Conducting research for enterprise software comes with its own set of challenges: decades old software, hyper-specific personas and JTBD, navigating data restrictions and hierarchical relationships.

Despite these challenges, this research project was the perfect opportunity for me to establish myself and my team as UX experts that our business and development partners could rely on for the duration of the larger project.

Constraints

From the start of this project, there were multiple factors working against me.

First, I only had 2 weeks to conduct the research and present the findings in time for an in-person workshop. This meant that any activities I planned had to be lean and flexible to fit in the limited timeframe.

Second, I had limited access to my research participants. Due to the nature of the application and the process it supported, the users have extremely tight deadlines, reducing their willingness to participate. Additionally, the project itself was being kept under wraps, so we were only allowed to interact with a small user list provided by the business.

Third, the business stakeholders we were working with had no experience with the UX or software development process. This meant that I needed to ensure my final deliverables were easily digestible to meet my stakeholders where they were at.

Lastly, I was unable to attend the workshop the deliverables were intended for. This meant that any artifacts I created had to stand on their own and be suitable for the different contexts that they’ll be used for by another member of the UX team.

Process

Given the constraints, I opted for conducting ethnographic interviews with light usability study elements. I initially considered conducting a survey as well, but based on my understanding of this organization, I knew the response rate would be too low and slow to provide workable data. Interviews also allowed me the most room to explore and go down tangents that uncovered further insights.

I conducted 10 interviews with participants of various demographic qualities and expertise levels. During the interviews, I asked participants to demonstrate some tasks for me, so I could witness firsthand how these participants interacted with the current system and where their pain points were.

Throughout the interviews, I used personas, empathy maps and journey maps to document what I learned, giving me a head-start on the final artifacts I would be delivering.

After all the interviews, I refined these documents and created two versions: a classic Powerpoint presentation with simple “one-sheeter” slides of personas and UX recommendations, and a highly-visual journey map on an interactive whiteboard for workshop activities. All the information was formatted simply with clear definitions of any “UX-y jargon” such as personas and empathy maps.

Outcome

The most significant impact this research did was establish a strong partnership between the UX team and the business and development teams.

After my initial presentation of the findings prior to the workshops, business stakeholders vocally expressed how impressed they were in how thorough the research captured the insights they were expecting (and not expecting), making them feel heard. During the workshops, the UX team was able to effectively use the artifacts to communicate with the participants and drive discussions around user needs, rather than pure speculation.

So thorough was this research that even six months after it was conducted, pieces of the artifacts are referenced at the start of meetings, keeping the user top of mind. Seeing the research artifacts be re-used in this way makes it clear that I had not only generated valuable foundational research for this project, I influenced the mindset of this team to be user-centric in their approach for the duration of the product development cycle.