project goals
Increase usability and streamline flow of the application
Reduce likelihood of user error
Address lack of visibility across roles
The Finance application is used internally at UWM by the Finance team. In three roles, their tasks include reviewing and approving wire requests, initiating and releasing wires, and preparing receipts for clients and audit teams. This application is used to track the life of a wire transfer from UWM to any external payee. Millions of dollars in transfers travel through this application every day, so the tolerance for error is very low and the risk is very high.
As the primary UX Researcher/Designer on this project, working closely with a product owner, business analyst, and developers, I helped to bring our in-house users into the process. I spent a lot of time in discovery sessions with users to get to know their responsibilities and better understand their real needs, work through the complexity and the “why” of their process, and understand their behavior and workarounds in the current application.
Context: The Finance team is split into three areas: General Ledger, Treasury, and Payables; and the life of a wire follows a (mostly) linear path from one role to the next—but in the current application, the team had virtually no visibility of a wire's status across roles, creating communication issues both internally and with clients.
01 research
I conducted discovery interviews with three users (one from each segment of the Finance team) to fully understand their process, current pain points, and how the current application was meeting their needs. Through this research, working closely with the product owner, we identified several key areas of opportunity to help achieve the business goals of error prevention and increased efficiency, and more importantly, were able to build empathy with our users to understand their current day-to-day, values, and needs.
The biggest pain point that remained consistent across all three interviewees was the lack of visibility into the current status of wires they were working with. The most common communication errors happened when a wire's status changed unexpectedly and broke from the linear process it would typically follow. After some digging, I discovered that the main cause of this was a painstaking manual review process (visually confirming 7 and 10 data points between the wire details in the application compared to an often poor-quality PDF) required of the General Ledger team before marking it approved. Unlike the two-member review process of the Treasury team (one team member initiates a wire while another releases it), General Ledger team members do not have a second set of eyes as part of their process.
As part of these interviews, I also learned that the General Ledger team spends the most time in the application (an average of four hours a day compared to less than half an hour for the other two team segments). Based on this discovery and the key pain point described above, my product owner and I decided to prioritize their experience as our primary users.
02 design
After collaborating with other internal teams to utilize the data available from our other in-house platforms, we developed a solution that enabled users to only review line items in wires when the internal system showed a discrepancy—significantly reducing the amount of time a team member would need to review each wire, while drawing attention directly to problems. As part of this solution, an audit history panel would allow the wire requestor and approver to communicate directly within the platform with a history of these comments and all major events for visibility across roles. A major quality-of-life feature we implemented is the embedded PDF reader, eliminating the need for users to download wire PDFs to view them. Testing with this set of prototyped wireframes was met with resounding positivity and some areas for improvement—as a result of testing, we adjusted the hierarchy of information displayed and decided that allowing customization of the experience for each role was necessary for the MVP.
With testing on the final prototype, users reported an overall increase in ease of use compared to the original application and improved visibility into the data points most relevant to their work. We built the application using components from Material Design 2 to promote speed and consistency within the development team.
"Is that PDF right in there? You mean I don't have to download it anymore? … This is going to save me so many headaches."
03 impact
In the first month of implementation, the time spent per wire reduced from an average of 40 minutes spent in the application to 31 minutes. The number of manual status changes reduced by 46% and the number of god-mode overrides reduced by 40%, compared to the month before implementation. While it’s difficult to directly measure why errors occurred in previous versions of the application, the number of errors overall was reduced and members of the finance team did (qualitatively) report easier communication between segments— and a decrease in frustration caused by the application.*
*While this data is not scientific by any means, if someone feels that their job is made easier by the application, I’m counting it as a win.