Building a proactive design strategy through user intelligence

Highlights

“ Developing a product strategy that leverages industry knowledge to demonstrate value to a wider audience”

[Screen shot of data platform website]

[Other screenshots to be created]

Context

The company had established themselves as a successful trader and broker within the energy commodity derivatives space, including producing their own software for trading in oil derivatives. Their aim was to increase their technology offering, leveraging output from their successful Research, Data and Media teams to increase appeal and buy-in from their customer base, which included major energy companies, as well as traders and brokers within the commodities derivatives markets. My goal was to identify ways in which we could increase that appeal, whilst building out the design team to support both existing projects as well as new initiatives.

The Challenge

Create a way for the company to leverage their considerable domain expertise and demonstrate value to customers to increase revenue.

Building the foundation

Creating a design team

• Previously, the company’s design team consisted of a single designer, working to support production teams in something of a reactive capacity, working off change requests from stakeholders, and limited in scope.
• To approach the challenge outlined above, we needed to be able to develop a new strategic design approach, while also supporting the existing product teams.
• I started by hiring two User Interface designers who could create concepts, wireframes and design components for the product teams, using Lou Adler’s Performance based hiring process, and ensuring that we encouraged a more diverse set of candidates, and a better range of choice for the roles.

Creating a design strategy

• In order to ensure that we could demonstrate value to customers, it was key to to understand what those customers actually wanted
• My plan was to not only conduct research that informed work on existing products, but to also provide intelligence that informed strategic decisions, supporting the work of management, market intelligence, marketing and more.
• Starting with interviewing internal traders, brokers, researchers* and other stakeholders, I built up a picture of the different user types and their individual requirements
• From which I could then create “information radiators” – artefacts such as personas and user journeys, which I could then use to share insights with teams and stakeholders, and validate design decisions.
• These provided a basis from which to build, conducting interviews with external traders, brokers and other industry experts in order to get a wider and richer understanding of the different requirements

[images of personas]

[images of user journeys]

Discoveries

Insights gained from research with users included:

• Awareness: a number of traders interviewed expressed lack a knowledge of the platform or the company’s other offerings
• Reticence: many traders still used Excel sheets to track price movements, which, although unwieldy, provided them with the ability to customise the data they worked with
• Varied sources: as part of their work, users needed to consult a range of different sources or data and news, as well as communication channels. These often got quite complex and hard to keep track of
• Customisation: the majority of users interviewed expressed an interest in only one commodity or specific markets, and wanted the ability to tailor their view to show just the areas they were interested in.

Ideation

• Leveraging different expertise
• Combining information sources
• Customising information view
• Adapting to different screens and use cases
• “Dawn to dusk” information service
• Try before you buy approach

Approach

• Communicating findings: providing weekly updates to management and heads of departments, sharing insights and updates, combining together Confluence wikis as a platform to store and share information.
• Demonstrating value quickly: creating a website to show off data sources, which would generate interest while longer-term work went on.
• Build, measure, learn: developing an approach to building out what would be a large project, testing concepts and challenging assumptions with users and stakeholders (especially as they were more expert in the subject matter than me), preventing any surprises and ensuring a successful product.

[To be continued]

Retrospective

Project takeaways:

• I managed to establish a proactive design team, who worked alongside product development teams to ensure that strategic decisions were based upon evidence from user and business intelligence
• This also challenged the culture of C-level executives changing direction every few weeks, leading to more direction and reduced stress for product teams
• While the company decided not to continue with my plans for the product, they said that they felt I had done some excellent work, and I had provided them with a good template for future product developments.
• I also feel that if this work had been continued, it would have provided a highly competitive advantage in an industry which had been lacking in innovation.