Financial Services Infrastructure Company
Design Systems | Process Diagraming | Product Strategy
This company brought in our team to help solve the issue of product creep and data fidelity within their financial office. Many of their systems weren’t connected or effectively utilized, their data streams were sluggish or hard to access, and many departments had to handle large requests person to person resulting in expensive delays. Our role was to find the most strategically beneficial use-cases, as well as develop a more unified solution to house their many products and data warehouses. Our final deliverables included future state renderings of the presentation layer, a prioritized document of 40+ actionable use-cases, and maps of both their network architecture and highest priority process diagrams.
Research
Our research phase included a number of planning sessions with the CFO Leadership team to establish the scope and identify subject experts within each participating department. We held a number of collaborative workshops with each department to get a sense of their person pain points as well as the ways they needed to interface with other departments’ personnel or data. From there, we conducted several deep dive interviews with super users or systems experts to identify key areas of user concern and technical complexity.
Process Diagrams
Throughout our investigation, we catalogued processes that required multiple departments, disconnected networks and local assets, or were mission critical to the CFO. These maps incorporate what information is being moved, where its coming from, who is manipulating that information, and where the target location is.
For larger processes that require the cooperation of an entire department, significant cost/effort and reaches the CFO leadership, we developed swim lane diagrams to illustrate the whole process.
This example highlights how often data is kept and maintained in localized sharepoint drives, preventing other departments from accessing the most up-to-date information before manipulating their own data to send down the line before it gets to the Executive level.
Design System & Future State Screens
Once the use cases were illustrated, prioritized, and selected, our team could augment and expand the design system to allow our proposed solutions to have an intuitive and cohesive look and feel across the board. Style guides and UI shells like the ones shown below would allow the development team to easily implement the design changes. Because many of the Oracle or custom solutions would have to be built by different teams and for different departments, having a consistent system of user interactions like forms, uploaders, and messages would help the users to feel comfortable in new environments with minimal friction.
Design System
Future State Screens
DElivery & Reception
The final deliverables of our project included the process maps, data architecture diagrams, prioritization matrix, design system changes, and the future state screens. Once the client leadership approved these artifacts, we brought some of the changes to the super-users for their final thoughts. Across the board, the users were just as satisfied/excited if not moreso than management. We passed the design system documents over to a development and internal design team to begin work on the next phase.