Meeting new laws and regulations through design thinking
Client: A major wealth management firm
Role: UX Design Lead, UX Craft Lead, and Enterprise Design Thinking Co-Creator
Intent
The client was facing new financial laws and regulations in the coming year. They were determined to use this challenge as an opportunity to use design thinking to meet these regulations and improve their customers’ experience as well as change their ways of working internally. IBM iX was brought on as a partner to support these efforts. In the initial twelve weeks with the client, a Design Adoption engagement was launched to define how design thinking would be applied throughout the organization. At the same time, three simultaneous accelerated visioning engagements focused on defining a vision for the firm’s most important work.
Impact
In the twelve weeks, we designed and delivered a user experience to be implemented in the near term to deliver above and beyond the United States financial laws and regulations. We delivered a comprehensive vision blueprint including all deliverables: two, high-fidelity clickable prototypes with 213+ screens, a user journey with six personas, 166 capabilities, hills, and problem statements, a roadmap for implementation, and research findings. We enabled the participants of the initial engagement to lead their future engagements through the established, repeatable, and measurable approaches, and the client was excited about their vision and looked for more opportunities to continue to partner with us.
Democratizing Design in Financial Services | Adobe Creative Cloud
Watch a live stream panel about this engagement and the importance of design thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hz-CIqXld0
Team structure:
To create alignment across the three engagements, we were organized into Crafts: business, tech architecture, visual design, and user experience. My role as the UX Craft lead was to introduce and teach the key UX activities: personas, user flows, user journey maps, and wireframes to the Edward Jones team members aligned with UX (close to 30 of them) and as lead UX designer on my own engagement team, facilitate the creation of these at each phase of the engagement.
Working in a cross-disciplinary team, we collaborated daily, and in person, with the client team to understand business needs and financial regulations as well as teach and facilitate key activities in our accelerated visioning process.
Collaborating to create the future vision:
We conducted initial discovery research through phone and in-person, contextual interviews and established a weekly research cadence that continued throughout the engagement. Sponsor users participated in in-person and virtual ideation sessions to provide feedback and guidance. Weekly user bench sessions enabled us to bring concepts and designs to users for additional validation. Weekly playbacks created a space for key stakeholders to view our progress, provide feedback, and align on the next steps.
Delivering the future state experience:
For the final vision, we collaborated across the three engagements to create a cohesive storyline for our personas, weaving our screens and journeys together to tell a full, end-to-end narrative. We designed two, high-fidelity clickable prototypes with 213+ screens to visualize the full, future-state end-to-end experience. We delivered a final playback of these prototypes to client stakeholders and executives and received high praise.
