UX CASE STUDY
RAROC Calculator
CHARM
CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHTS
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ORG & SECTOR: Fulton Bank, Commercial Banking
MY ROLE: UX Strategy, Research & Design; Brand Identity; Product Design.
TEAM: Business Product Owner, Tech Lead, App Dev, Business Analyst & me
RAROC: Risk-adjusted Return on Capital
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Convincing Business to trust IT’s in-house application development team.
Pioneering agile scrum as the first-ever team to work truly agile.
Identifying a Minimum Lovable Product release.
Setting realistic timeframe & cadence of delivery.
Carving out space and autonomy for team to self-manage and improve each sprint.
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Leveraging a relationship previously formed (the product owner with brilliant ideas built in Excel and me in leading discovery sessions and visualizing desirable flows) we forged a strong partnership where I visually translated his intentions into building blocks of a desirable experience.
I led Design Sprints to define the right thing coupled with a mobile-first approach to define focus and hierarchy.
I pioneered Lean UX techniques with conceptual testing first, refinement & planning second, & dev third. Building, measuring with the product users, and learning - in small iterations.
I created roadmaps and taught the team how to use them, empowering the product owner to control what happens next. Roadmaps helped to align product team efforts, reveal strategy, and communicate the planned tactics to reach business objectives and customer goals.
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Our product team’s success encouraged IT to start forming other product teams under our team’s “lived-it-learned-it” insights.
Business’ trust in IT’s in-house talent grew.
Our product team steadily improved our efficiency with each sprint, reaching profound collaboration.
Our product’s usage began increasing as the early adopters shared their stories of success.
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User testing
Contextual interviews
Feedback of feature flow options through prototypes before dev efforts (estimations, planning, scheduling and development).
KEY TAKEAWAY
Know who to partner with and give them a megaphone.
Carve out the essential time and space to get it all out.
Early discovery sessions generate a ton of energy. Everyone gets a voice (and necessary tools). Using appropriate design thinking exercises, I get everyone rallied around level-appropriate considerations. We sketch, we whiteboard, we use stickies, we affinity map our thoughts, we put things in timeline order.
We start rough, fast, and inexpensive.
To encourage others to think of each page/view having a clear focus, I create simple mobile device sketches. We get it all out first and then return to identify must-haves versus nice-to-haves. Our core group in these sessions consisted of PO, tech lead, BA, and me.
Prototyping helps the team explore options fast and cheap.
After I help to identify an MVP (or MLP, Minimum Lovable Product) and the Product Owner, including the rest of the product team is in alignment, we can most accurately estimate the amount of work needed to build the functionality based upon my thorough exploration of all of the potential paths and variables within my prototypes. To ensure how our users will interact in reality with the features, I user test from a combination of simulated prototype flows, along with any developed but unpolished UI the developer has built.
Robust digital product design considers thorough direction, definition & communication of all interactions, patterns, best practices and scenarios beyond the happy path.
TOP PICTURE shows implemented design of the type-ahead pattern -- a complex feature requiring robust design specifications, researched usability case studies, heuristic evaluations of other sites to demonstrate desired behavior, contextual understanding of code behind the UI, as well as thorough communication to development, BA, and QA members.
MIDDLE PICTURE shows a customized modal implemented in production for handling calculated comparisons of key information the user must consider during risk calculation.
BOTTOM PICTURE shows results of a cross-system verification of an attempted action. For most specialized digital products, it’s a delicate dance between communicating just enough information and properly displaying such information in an easy-to-consume manner. For users to take appropriate action they must understand what’s taken place or has been attempted, they must trust the action that’s about to be done, and feel at ease with how to back out/undo the action if necessary.
“The Palmer Pricing model is by far the best RAROC model I’ve used of any of the banks I’ve worked at; it’s very user-friendly and less clunky than Citizens or Wells Fargo’s existing models.”
— Jon P., Commercial Relationship Manager
Contextual Interviews + User Testing = GOLD.
Two of my favorite activities I cherish in being a human-centric designer are conducting contextual interviews and facilitating user testing. I have found a perfect balance in combining the two activities within the same session, as it establishes rapid rapport with my interviewee/user tester, and the session always provides more insights than I’d ever anticipated.
Even better is when other members of the product team are able to join me (they are usually in the back so as not to distract). Having them observe our product users interact with a product they’ve helped to build reminds them why they do what they do! Seeing them with their own eyes real-time, rather than just hearing me relay the experience after the fact, is worth its weight in gold. It’s a win-win!
Attention to details clarifies design, planning, estimating and working agile with product teams.
Every organization in the business of building digital interfaces must have a system of record for accountability, alignment, estimation, grooming, prioritization, scoping, and, in essence, the tactics that must be undertaken to get it done. Due to my extremely organized nature, I rally the team around intuitive product management architecture, taking the lead in ensuring our structure in the system is easy to work with, tagged in ways that make sense, and is a solid (yet flexible) foundation that can grow as the product matures over time.