Improving the Usability of Enterprise Software Financial Products

Roles - Lead Design Strategist, Lead UX and UI Designer

Setting the scene

I was the lead designer overseeing strategy, research, and design to a team that develops a suite of enterprise software financial products.

Our design team rated the finance team’s cornerstone product 41.98/100 for usability after a thorough heuristic evaluation.

My role was to take the recommendations from the evaluation as well as my own research to provide design recommendations to make this a more usable tool.

The Problem

As I was preparing to start that work, priorities changed…I had to shift gears, and begin work on the design for a net-new product to the suite.

The team I was partnered with previously had a pattern of “saving time and effort” by simply copying other legacy product’s UI’s, even with completely different use cases risking a terrible experience for the users of this net new product. Some stakeholders wanted to utilize the design of the cornerstone product that got a 41.98 score and repurpose it for this net-new product.

But I had to stick up for our teammates, our users, and for design. I had to step in and plead my case.

What I did

Over the next 10 months, I interviewed users of our new product to replace their manual, inefficient process. I created sketches to share feasibility with the dev team and test for value with our future users, and I created low and high-fidelity prototypes to further share designs with the dev team and test for usability with our users.

This new design would allow for the set up for analysis to be smooth and logical, and for the results to be displayed in a clear way, with options to compare data over a period of time in the application and not through a disjointed process including multiple spreadsheets and products.

When it came to working with the development team, I pushed for the team to utilize our design system, which was specifically created for accessibility and to fit in to the look and feel of other enterprise software.

I also pushed for our team to utilize the ready-made components of our design system, which saved our team time and effort while implementing my designs in their continuous two-week sprints.

What happened?

Our team’s hard work resulted in the MVP of this net-new product. With a design NOT copied from the cornerstone product utilizing the enterprise design system.

When evaluated for a baseline heuristic evaluation score, the net-new product scored 64.32/100 - more than 20 points higher than the cornerstone product the team wanted to copy. Even better, the product transformed a process that originally took 2-4 hours to complete to one that took around 45 minutes to complete. 

Why does this matter?

When asked what one of our new users would do with the time they’d get back from working in our new product, one said,

“If I’m not looking at results, I’m looking into the data to see if we can improve the model accuracy.”

The time we were able to give back to our users meant that they could spend time providing more value to the company.