FINTECH | BANKING | CASE STUDY

Finastra CreditQuest Loan Origination Dashboard

01. OVERVIEW

Personalised and fully customisable dashboard for credit analysts to standardise their financial analysis process in a collaborative and streamlined workflow. This case study goes over the dashboard and entity creation workflows used by credit analysts within a financial institution. This is an ongoing project currently in development.

MY ROLE

Design lead, User flows, User Interviews, Usability Testing, Lo/Hi-fi Wireframes

THE TEAM

3 designers, 2 product managers, 6 engineers

TOOLS

Adobe XD, Miro, Jira + Confluence, UserTesting

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE CURRENT INTERFACE?

“The current interface is not easy for new credit analysts to understand. It currently takes about 2 years to learn everything you can do within Financial Analyser.” 
THE PROBLEM

Besides the steep learning curve, the current interface lacks the necessary content credit analysts need to view within Financial Analyser (FA) upon login. Because of this, credit analysts spend less than 5 seconds on the dashboard before they go into a specific workflow.

THE SOLUTION

A fully customisable dashboard that serves as a central source where credit analysts get access to their most-recent workflows and features, allowing them to start/continue a workflow without the need to leave the main interface.

02. DISCOVERY

Our team attended a user conference where we sat down with users of Financial Analyser to better understand their frustrations with the interface and current workflow. We also handed out surveys where users rated CreditQuest’s ease of use to provide us with their top 3 likes and dislikes. We created a Mural board with the feedback gathered from the user interviews and surveys to get a quick overview of user likes/dislikes and feature requests.

 
 

Key Findings:

🔎 Dashboard customisation

Users spent a few seconds in the current dashboard before they jumped into a workflow because it lacked useful content. Users asked for a way to start a workflow inside the dashboard and to have a way to customise what they view in their dashboard.

🔎  Need for notifications and reminders

This was a huge ask by most users. Financial Analyser does not offer a way for users to get notified if another user updated/edited information. Users wanted to have a place within the FA solution where they can keep track of their daily tasks.

🔎 Not user friendly

Managers who trained new credit analysts found it difficult to properly train new employees because the interface and workflows were not intuitive. Users complained that there were “too many ways” to complete the same task.

🔎 Too many clicks to start a workflow

It takes a total of six clicks from the dashboard to find where to go to create a new entity. This was a huge frustration for almost every user.

Credit Analyst Persona

Based on the insights and data gathered, we had enough data to start crafting our credit analyst personas. Due to the complex nature of FA, we worked closely with subject matter experts to make sure our newly crafted personas were an accurate description of the users of FA. Below is an example of one of the three user personas we created.

03. DASHBOARD + ENTITY CREATION FLOWS

Based on research and user feedback, I knew the dashboard needed to be the central location where users accessed their most-recent workflows and features while having the option to create a new entity without leaving this view. I took the notes from our synthesis to create a skeleton of possible options inside the dashboard.

For the entity creation workflow, I wanted to speed up the number of information users had to input before getting into the entity page. I pitched the idea to have a modal that served as a wizard for users to input basic information (such as entity type, business name, TIN #). This information is not always added by the credit analyst and since this redesign is for the new cloud integration, this was a perfect way to create a new entity on a tablet or mobile view.

04. CONCEPT SKETCHES + LO-FI MOCKUPS

Sketching Out Ideas

It was time to come up with solutions for the dashboard and entity creation UI. I always start my design process by sketching rough drafts on paper to quickly get any ideas I have out before turning them into gray-scale wireframes. My section focused on the dashboard and the entity creation wizard. Once those were done, I shared my ideas with the team and combined them with the rest of the entity workflow.

Lo-Fi Wireframes

In the current interface, there is so much white space available that is not being used. If we are going to add widgets and workflows into the new dashboard, we needed to utilise as much room as possible. CreditQuest is often accessed on desktop (1920 x 1080) which gave me a lot of room to work with. One of my teammates was tasked with the left navigation interface which I had to account for when deciding where to place the new dashboard cards and widgets.

The search bar is a feature that is constantly used to search for entities within CreditQuest. I knew this had to be in a place where it can be easily accessed. I also wanted to include a button whose primary purpose was to allow credit analysts to a new entity creation right away.

Playing around with the placement of different elements and seeing how the dashboard would adapt when the sidebar was expanded vs. collapsed

Entity creation was done by clicking on the “create new” button. From there, a modal appears with different options based on the user's tasks. The modal asks the user a series of questions based on what options the user's clicked and pre-populates these answers in the entity creation workflow once the user clicks "save”.

Two different modal options where users can select the type of entity they need to create.

User Testing: Unmoderated A/B Testing

We conducted A/B testing with 6 users within the UserTesting platform. We invited users from the conference we attended to ensure we tested the dashboard with current users of Financial Analyser. The main goal for this round of testing was to see if the new dashboard interface had the tools and features users needed to accomplish their day-to-day tasks.

I created 10 tasks for users to complete within the dashboard and modal interface. Once they completed those, we asked them to create a new entity to test out the rest of the workflow.

Dashboard Findings:

  • 6/6 users found the new dashboard to be a massive improvement.

  • 4/6 users thought the 3 dots inside the cards would give them filtering options. They were not expecting to have widget-specific settings.

  • 4/6 users expected to go to another page when they clicked on the “view all” button inside the recent entities card. But they understood the behaviour once they clicked on the button.

“I can see where I left off from the previous day and start a new loan right away. This is fantastic!”

“I wasn’t expecting the 3 dots to be for the widget. I thought it would give me filtering options for the entities shown.”

Modal + Entity Creation Findings:

  • 3/6 users created a new entity by clicking on the button. The other half clicked on the quick action widget option.

  • 1/6 users thought after clicking on “save” they would be taken to a read-only view.

  • 3/6 users found the “relationships” tab but were tempted to click on the sidebar

“I don’t like that there are two options to create a new entity. I wish the widget had a different option.”

“Saving an entity keeps me on the same view. I was expecting to go to a read-only view”

05. IMPROVEMENTS + FINAL DESIGNS

Based on the various feedback we gathered from the testing sessions, we iterated our designs and made the final improvements.

06. OUTCOMES + NEXT STEPS

We have handed the designs to the development team in Trivandrum. They are currently building the dashboard and entity creation workflows in a test environment. Below are screenshots of the current test environment. Due to the time zone differences, we review their work in the morning (Pacific Time) and send them back feedback with any design changes. We have at least one-afternoon meeting a week where we answer any questions they might have for us or for them to do a live demo.

During the next iteration, the dev team will work on adding the alerts and note cards into the dashboard, followed by sidebar refinement and finishing the entity creation screens.