SaaS for Financial Services redesign
Role:
Product Designer
Case Management is a SaaS Customer Experience product for Financial Services Industry. Finance agents execute an action plan in a chronological order but may dynamically change based on user’s decisions.
It was initially led by a design team that couldn't continue due to a difference in time zones.
My direct team holds biweekly meetings to share our designs and give each other feedback, so I was able to iterate and validate my designs.
Weekly scrum meetings with the Project Manager and our Development Team. During the ongoing sprints, I helped solve any questions regarding the user experience. Meanwhile, I worked on designing interactions for the next use cases.
Oracle is changing to a design-driven culture, but there has been a lot of resistance from PMs and Development Teams.
I inherited the project in the middle of an active sprint, so my research was very limited and had to rely mostly on the existing documentation.
I was working with Oracle's new design system, which was not fully completed and developers were not allowed to hardcode anything. I had to rely on the existing components available to us.
The current build was using an old design system. Flows were very complex by using up to 3 levels of nesting plus pop-ups. It was an opportunity to improve the architecture by prioritizing content and hierarchy.
The PM held user testing sessions with other product owners within the organization and business partners to iterate the current build. These where the most useful insights:
In the first two months, I was assigned as the point of contact for UX and suggested minor improvements.
I thought it would be a great opportunity to boost my career at Oracle, so after discussing it with my manager, I took full ownership and officially became the Product Designer assigned to the project.
My goal was to determine how to group similar objects and define a layout.
I used two grid systems, one for the parent layout and a second for the child container.
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I designed low fidelity wireframes to start defining the architecture and navigation. I used different colors to represent behavior.
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Unfortunately, this product didn´t align with our leadership´s goals for 2020, so the project was put on hold on the UX side, but the rest of the team continues to work on the first development iteration.
Trying to get PMs and Dev teams onboard with the UX Design process may be very challenging, but once they start seeing the results, solid arguments of your decisions, and most importantly, a lot of patience, they might start getting more excited about it and an amazing collaboration synergy will take place.
I´ve come to the understanding that getting clients onboard as stakeholders to do qualitative research or shadowing, can be very hard to conduct in such a large organization with so many products and teams. We have to rely on raw data, which is not bad, but both would be better.
To overcome the limitations of a design system that was still work in progress, I had to lose the fear of reaching out to the right people in search of answers. I became really close to the components team in Mexico, and they helped me validate my designs.
My direct team and I felt really disconnected from other projects within the same organization and were having a hard time following patterns already set by other teams. My manager was able to include us into multiple weekly meetings that other teams were hosting, so we could view their work, but also share ours. Kudos to my manager!
I would´ve liked to spend time myself with real users, rather than just relying on PM's requirements. Although I don´t question their hard work, interacting with real users is an essential part of a User Experience Designer role.