Foreign Exchange Portal

Overview

Objective

As one of the most important banks in the United States, this financial institution has a large portion of payments nationally and internationally. This company out to Adaptive in order to innovate the payment experience from both the customer and employee perspective. They also sought to expand their payment types in the Forex world to increase clientele and reach new areas of the market.

Problem

The company’s Forex and payments customers complain about the platform’s performance and lack of content organization. Most of the customers are unaware of all the functionality and features available due to poor design architecture. Stakeholders, having joined the bank from other companies in the last few years, have also noticed the lack of quality and performance when compared to other tools that other banks use. Another major concern is that the application is not fully accessible (ADA), and for legal reasons, it needs to meet all ADA standards.

My involvement

I joined this project from the start on March, 2021. I have been the lead (and only) designer in the project since then. I work closely with a Project Manager, Product Owner, Developers and QA Testers. We have stakeholders meetings at least 3 times a week, and we review designs with them as well as with the Accessibility Team to ensure ADA compliance. I have learned a lot about ADA rules and have applied them throughout my designs successfully.

Discovery & Research

For our Discovery phase, our team decided to divide the workshops into four sessions, which were hosted in Miro. Session 1 consisted of Lightning Talks and a demo of the current payments application. Session 2 involved creating personas together for all user types. Session 3 consisted of creating a rough draft of the user journey and workflow. Lastly, during session 4 we had users and stakeholders to share designs that they like and dislike, as well as some sketches of ideas that are hard to communicate verbally.

users & Personas

Senior Executives

Senior Executives are the highest-level users in the application. They are event-driven users who are usually pulled in many directions. They have the top responsibility when it comes to approving large transactions, onboarding users and managing the company’s transactions based on market risk. They are short in time to do administrative tasks, so they normally have an Assistant Manager under them executing the day-to-day activities. They are usually on the go, and need access to the application from anywhere they are.

Assistant Managers

Assistant Managers have both executive and assistant responsibilities. They manage accounts, execute trades, as well as create and approve transactional templates. When busy, they can delegate more administrative tasks to the Junior Assistants. It is important for them to have their tasks defined all in one place, since these can come from many sources, being related to transactions, reporting or administrative activities. They are mostly working in their office, with large monitors in which they have many opened tabs at once. They look at the market performance, news across the world and live rates to guide decisions on payments.

Junior Assistants / Task Masters

Junior Assistants are task-oriented users who are usually very busy with Foreign Exchange payments. They are constantly updating and maintaining templates, doing accounting tasks, and generating reports to senior teammates within their company. They currently have a hard time prioritizing their tasks efficiently. They are mostly working in the office, and communicate with senior people via phone and email.

IT/Help Desk Support

IT Support (currently 1 person) is in charge of setting up clients into the portal. The user also configures client’s usernames, passwords, and provide platform training. On top of these tasks, the user gets many calls during the day from clients with questions and frustrations on the current platform. This user feels very stressed, and is interrupted constantly with calls and is usually behind in getting things done.

user journey

After several interviews and demos, I took my notes and grouped them by each sequential step needed for a transaction. I had a session with stakeholders to review the content captured, as well as to add on top of my notes in Miro. The stakeholders were impressed with this tool, and were very collaborative. They added great ideas, filled in the steps that were missing information, and really gave them a detailed view of their existing workflow, which they never had visually seen in this way. It effectively made them realize the gaps and opportunities of their application with our guide and support.

As part of our initial deliverable, we put together a very detailed, high fidelity user journey mapping it to each user persona, and how those personas connected with each other.