Imagine a tool offering insights into your and your competitor’s business. Financial Insights offers a subscription model that combs through your and others’ financial data. Once the data is made anonymous, Financial Insights allows users to generate a large spectrum of reports to help them better manage and price their business.

The challenge is connecting all the data to offer real-world insights.

When given this design problem, several objectives guided me. 

• The hero needs to be the chart and supporting table data.

• The charts and tables need to adjust per the input to show how selections affect the outcome—no wizards - real-time updating.

• Provide the ability to save reports at any time to complete later or to use as every growing reference in the future.

• As always, the interface will stay out of the way.

RESEARCH

Our team began work in March 2020 as the world was shutting down. Reaching out to users of the current system during this time was new for both sides. Instead of previous research techniques, we returned to the good old one-on-one conversations about what they wanted to see changed and what they had to keep. As in most research, trends developed early, and we began to see our way forward. 

The users wanted...

1. ...to build reports on the fly and see the data change as they adjusted variables.

2.  ...large clear charts in a variety of formats.

3. ...to save their reports and have them adjust automatically with time.

CLIENT ROUNDTABLE

With the world changing fast, we needed to find a way to bounce ideas off users and get immediate feedback. To do this, we set up a group of nine paid clients to offer feedback on business and user experience decisions as needed. For example, I would post a prototype and a few questions, and within an hour or two, I'd have immediate feedback. This kind of feedback can be great, but it can also contradict the product team's desires. Learning to listen to the client's words and applying them to a process had many rewards.

OUTCOME

Replacing a product experience can often have unforeseen drawbacks and alienate users who like things the way they are. To be sure we didn't upset this group, we opted to keep the old and new versions live while allowing the users to switch back and forth. With education on the benefits and some price nudging, we successfully moved 98% of the users to the new experience.