Listen First

Challenge 

We were asked to provide agile-research support (over the course of a year) as the client-side team planned a transition to a new website framework which needed with stakeholder listening sessions with eight business focus groups. The stakeholders told us that users were reporting that they were having difficulty finding products belonging to a certain (important) lines of business. 

Approach

First, we had to confirm there was a problem. We talked to almost 30 users and a group of over 36 different stakeholders. Our goal was to generate conversational feedback tags related to the site - our priority was to gain early understand of the content strategy related to these segments. 

Second, we conducted a 100+ hour heuristic analysis to understand and categorize the website while generating research results from our users.

Third, we tested the website with users. While trying to learn whether their existing navigation UI was letting the client down, we found that maybe the entire way they the business conceptualized the menu and navigation weren’t what users say they wanted. We worked with the client for recruiting strategy—  in each participant pool, they recruited 2-3 users and we recruited 2-3 users.  The client had upwards of 10 customer segments in the 5+ customer segment areas— we had to make strategic choices about who to talk with to generate useful research across these segment areas.

Next, we complied what we learned into research theory and practice documents that we vetted with the client that serves as the plain-language description of the necessary content for each page. Our goal is to work out in the open— working on a research guide with the client, understanding the specific questions they wanted addressed. 

Results

The top outcome of our research and discovery was that we were able to validate that nobody liked how the existing content was presented. Ultimately, we designed a new navigation schema that would accommodate their lines of business but match a content design closer to what the users said they’d expect— to be designed around the way the customer sees themselves and not the way the bank sees itself. Our project helped our client enrich the way they thought about navigating a client thru their site and the solution we provided helped them better meet what their customers wanted. 

We took a big, complicated page full of confusing links and poor internal navigation and distilled it down to one easy-to-understand institutional banking experience that features search, easy sliders for industry-type selection and prominent feature of products and services. Our design reduced possible user scroll time and clicks by over half and helped the team make the argument for a search-centric strategy by featuring it in the middle of the page.