Optimization of a Treasury Management System Serves Offices in 100+ countries

#product_design #B2B #contextual_inquiry #user_journey_map #UX_optimization

Project Background

I got the job of leading the design research of the Treasury Management System in a MNC. The system is used in offices in over 100 countries.

• Goal: To improve user experience and to increase efficiency.

• Challenges: We are talking about a product used by hundreds of users scattered around the world. With the time strain and limited budget I couldn’t reach out to all of them and conduct the research face-to-face.

I can't present the specific findings and design recommendations due to NDA, but I can share the process. 

Methods and Approach

STEP 1: Expert Interview @ HQ

The goal at this stage is to:

- Gain basic knowledge of the business process

- Be familiarize with the system

- Learn the key users

We identified three types of key users of the system. They each have different day-to-day tasks, they need to make decisions on different scales, and they have different priorities and concerns.

STEP 2: Field Research

The sampling was based on 3 criteria:

1. cover as many scenarios as possible (so we can make the most out of one trip) so we are looking for a busy area where a lot of transactions going on;

2. want an area with enough samples, in this case respondents, and

3. ideally that region has unique characteristic in their business

We interviewed users of each role, talked about what they do, how they use the system, what tasks can and can not be done on the system, and recorded their painpoints. For each role, we come up with a user journey map describing what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, what obstacles and barriers they may encounter.

In this process, we focused on questions such as:

• Who does each user interact with?

• What actions did they take?

• Did they finish these tasks online/offline?

• Did they rely on other tools to finish the task?

STEP 3: Prototyping & Usability Test

We combined the journey maps of each role we gathered from the previous step, re-designed the system map, which is a synthetic representation that shows all the different roles involved in one single frame, and their mutual links. It helps clarifying how the different service components and roles are connected with each other, highlighting the values they exchange.

We utilized paper prototyping to involve users in an early stage, as well as test our mock-up in a cost-effective way.

In the end, among other features, the dashboard looks like this. Each role has different purview, but overall they get a bird’s eye view of the region they are in charge of, and a list of tasks waiting to be done, prioritized by emergency and alerts that bring the emergency to attention.