SERVUS CREDIT UNION

How Design Sprints & UX Research transformed a SaaS platform’s efficiency

“Servus Credit Union is a member-owned, community-based financial institution offering several banking products such as mortgages, loans, business and personal banking ”

Summary

Servus Credit Union wanted to redesign their internal Mastercard customer support portal to increase support staff efficiency. They wanted to investigate the feasibility of transforming the portal into a true SaaS platform that could process customer support queries in real time

Leading with user research, contextual inquiry sessions and design sprints, I provided a transformation pathway to revamp and integrate key functionalities in a "view-only" SaaS platform

My Role
User Research, Product Design

Activities
Design Sprints, User Testing, Taxonomy Design, Wireframes, Design Concepts

Client
Servus Credit Union

Methodology
User Interviews, Contextual Inquiry Sessions

Getting Started

We kicked off the project by conducting a discovery and requirements gathering session with key senior stakeholders. This would give us an overarching understanding of goals, objectives and challenges. Ahead our discovery sessions, the team also shared strategic documentation as well as preliminary system flows the solution architects had been working on.

Coming out of discovery we scheduled our first round of support staff 1-on-1 user interviews.

Houston, we have a complexity problem

My support staff user interviews revealed significant complexity around the team’s common recurring use cases and the need to access several external systems during the course of a customer support request

To better understand this complexity I conducted two contextual inquiry sessions with the leads of both teams. I paid particular attention to “hacks and workarounds” they performed when completing a task.

Research Methodologies:

Digging into support staff pain points and frustrations

Stuff that kept the team up at night

  • The current platform was “read-only”, eg. no real-time transactions or modifications could be performed on a customer record

  • All support functions were done manually, with staff needing to access many different platforms while serving customers

  • Modifying a customer record was not done in real time and would take on average 24-36 hours

Changing course & adapting to complexity

Coming out of the research phase I wanted to Investigate the feasibility of integrating the functionality of external systems into the platform workflow

Tackling complexity with Design Sprints

In order to understand technology feasibility, security architecture and business processes, it was clear I needed to expand the circle of teams I was talking with, beyond the support staff. My approach was to conduct design sprints that would include: lead solutions architect, developers, marketing lead, product owner and business analysis leads.

Design Sprint Collaboration Boards

  • The Design Sprint teams included a decider, facilitator, tech expert, business expert - client side. Myself as lead strategist, plus PM, tech expert on our side

  • Post-it notes outline “How Might We” statements. HMW’s were used to reframe the problem in a more open and solution-agnostic way during the define phase

  • We conducted process mapping of 6 of the most common recurring use cases

Ideation Sprint

  • I facilitated collaborative ideation and sketching out ideas with the team

  • Part of the ideation sprint included sketching out high level mapping of potential external systems that could be integrated into the platform

In the decide phase, we reviewed our various ideas and sketches against technology constraints and feasibility. With those in mind, we aligned on the solution and I took some of the ideas of our sketches and went into hi-fidelity prototyping that would be ready for testing

Aligning on the solution

Current User Interface

  • For context, the current UI had several usability and accessibility issues

  • Drop down menus made information foraging difficult, leading to a high cost of interaction

Revised UI & Wireframes

Wireframes derived from our Initial lo-fidelity screens, which evolved during the design concepts phase.

Usability testing

I conducted moderated 1-on-1 user testing with 5 participants, garnering a 98% success vs. error rate

Business Outcomes

Opportunities Found

Although we started out focusing on 6 priority recurring use cases, it became clear our solution could apply to several more use cases that were to be addressed in future design sprints

Value Created

Transformed a “view-only” support platform into a feature-rich tool by integrating functionalities of external systems.

Let’s work together

I would love to discuss more details about this project; feel free to get in touch to schedule a call or meeting. Email me at: dotsandloopsdigital@gmail.com or send me a message using the form.