Dynamic Planner | User research

Context: Dynamic Planner is the UK’s most widely used risk profiling and financial planning service, used by over 6,500 financial advisers and financial institutions to ensure investment suitability. When I joined, the company’s product roadmap was very much sales-led. While this can be a viable approach, particularly early in the life of a company, some features had been requested by and developed for a single customer, who had subsequently left. Other features were only being used by a tiny number of customers, but all of these features needed to be maintained, adding to the development and test team’s workload.

Approach

The problem was understood, but in the constant drive to get new features out of the door and continue to deliver great service, no-one felt able to address either the accumulated technical debt, or make sense of the incoming stream of product requests. Being new to the team I was able to take ownership of this issue, and get buy-in from senior management by framing it as a way to focus the scarce development resource on those areas that would make the most difference to our users.

Initial survey

Fortunately the company had contact addresses for thousands of customers, and permission to email them. The first step therefore was to design a short survey which would:

  • Explore the type of work done by customers

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 conducted:

  • initially 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.