End to end UX | ISAs
Project: ISAs are a first step on the investment ladder for most people, but financial advisers are reluctant to set them up because of the time and effort required. AccessAdvice was a responsive website enabling advisers to provide ISAs to clients in much less time and at lower cost than traditional approaches, letting them expand their client base with minimal cost.
Role: User research, design, prototyping, multiplatform testing, writing user stories.
Result: A product that reduced the time needed by advisers to deliver ISAs from 240 minutes to 30 minutes, with the time needed by the client reduced from 90 minutes to 20 minutes.
Combined methods user research
Thanks to the programme of quarterly surveys and interviews I had established, there were hundreds of research contacts happy to be involved, and about whom detailed information was available to select representative participants.
To begin, detailed interviews were conducted with 15 firms which fed into the user requirements, personas and user journey maps. Personas for both advice firms and target clients that had been sketched out during early discussions were fleshed out as more data became available, helping the project team get a more rounded view of the target audience - both advisers and clients.
As well as understanding the user base, it was also important to bring advisers with us on the journey: this was a new product, and advisers had to be comfortable with what we were doing so they would be open and honest with us, both to validate the design and to be able to give them confidence in what was a new product category.
The interview results were taken and validated through a survey with the much wider customer base of financial advisers. Here, the qualitative interview data shaped the questions, while the survey results helped to quantify the interview results against the broad mass of prospective users.
Design and prototyping
Design ideas were explored as Axure prototypes, and shared with the research group of clients, with their feedback feeding into further iterations of the design. Among a wide range of ideas explored were different approaches to asking questions.
An early design took a much more visual style than had previously been used (select to see an example question)
A later design proposed a video introduction from the adviser combined with a more Typeform-like style
Build started early in the project, and feedback quickly moved on to the live code.
Multiplatform testing
User testing was conducted using WhatUsersDo, which provided video and audio of users working through the process. Over 100 end to end process runthroughs were initially conducted with the target socioeconomic group (ABC1), then with C2DE in order to ‘stress test’ the copy and process
If the C2DE group could use it effectively, we could be confident that it was clear and understandable for the target audience. Testing identified a huge number of mostly small improvements to the wording, layout, and device compatibility, which were quickly implemented in the prototype.
An interesting finding from the mobile testing centred around date selection. The video of one Android user showed him trying to select his date of birth using the default Android date picker. Unable to see how to change the year, he went back month by month until his date of birth was shown as 18 years ago - not accurate but enough to proceed, which by this point was all the tester wanted to do!
This finding triggered a redesign of the date picker away from the default to a picker that had proven it’s usability in previous testing.
Result
The research, design, and test programme let Dynamic Planner launch a new product category with confidence, making ISAs more accessible by dramatically reducing the time needed by advisers and clients to deliver ISAs. Overall, AccessAdvice was a great example of how engagement with users can guide and support the development of a new product, bringing users along the journey.