Scenario

Alternative Investments Order Processing

Fidelity’s Alternative Investments group needed to modernize a currently operating 25 year old application for Order processing that was too limiting and increasingly expensive to maintain. The pace of Order processing was not improving, but volume of Orders was increasing. Accuracy, customer service, and job satisfaction were all being threatened.

My teammates

- Product Manager

- Technical Lead

- 3 Developers


My role

  • - UX research & testing
  • - Brand & Design System
  • - Information architecture
  • - Workflow analysis

My methods

  • - Competitive analysis
  • - User interviews
  • - UI audit
  • - Wireframing & prototyping
  • - Analytics & product testing

Contact

email@domain.com

000-000-000


— Instagram

— Twitter

— Facebook

Challenges

Start with the Problem Statement

One of the most powerful first steps is to craft a Problem Statement along with teammates in Business and Technology. Gaining a consensus on root problems help all three of us focus our skills and perspectives when iterating and evaluating many possible solutions.


What’s the problem?

- 25k Orders/month pace

- Steady pace increase expected

- Not enough skilled workers


Who’s effected?

  • - Order Processors
  • - Process Managers
  • - Customer Service

Where does it happen?

  • - Jersey City, New Jersey
  • - Westland, Texas
  • - Galway, Ireland

Contact

email@domain.com

000-000-000


— Instagram

— Twitter

— Facebook

When does it happen?

- Orders are continuous

- 1pm Eastern ends settlement date

- 24 hr Service Level Agreement


Why does this occur?

  • - Most Orders take 7 min
  • - 20% of Order take 14 mins
  • - High cognitive load

Why is this important?

  • - Reduce fatigue
  • - Lower training costs
  • - Reduce calls to Customer Service
  • - Expand product capabilities

Contact

email@domain.com

000-000-000


— Instagram

— Twitter

— Facebook

Actions

Pain points in the journey

User interviews and an over-the-shoulder observation sessions helped the Journey Mapping exercise uncover hidden pain points, perceived problems, and confirm the opportunities for improvements

User interviews

- Gathered 10 hours of

screen recordings

- Documented several major inefficiencies in workflows


4 personas

- Order processors

- Order managers

- Investor relations

- Investor managers

Discoveries

- Time wasted switching between 5 applications

- Search, filter, and sorting was repeated every day

- Create, Read, Update, Delete functions mixed with approval process

Opportunities

- Reduce tool bloat

- Streamline workflows for approval/rejection processing

- Simplify with roles and task to reduce clicks, cognitive load

STEP ONE: A user will click on the Desktop icon to launch the new OpsWorX platform

STEP FIVE: Once an order has been chosen, the Confidence report will inform the user of a possible rejection because of missing data

STEP TWO: A loading screen shows progress, but may also show current version, updates available, and your role and permissions

STEP SIX: Processing the document, each section has been examined by Artificial Intelligence and is organized into a interactive checklist

STEP THREE: User is presented actionable data and Order automatically organized into queues to begin processing workflow immediately

STEP SEVEN: Missing information is easily viewed by following the interactive checklist and verified on the document

STEP FOUR: A data table allows a user to see other co-workers, valuable information to sort by, and a Confidence score from Artificial Intelligence

STEP EIGHT: The entire document must be examined, the processing time is reduce to just over 1 minute from a high of 14 minutes

Actions

Wireframing and testing solutions

Wireframes filled the need to create hypotheses, test, and iterate changes quickly with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Experiments included information architecture and interaction design for both Alter Investment's Order Processing application, but also the entire OpsWorX platform contain ~19 more applications for all of Fidelity's Operational Services Group.

Wireframe creation

- Gathered OpsWorX branding resources

- Created a simple, effective library wireframe components


Design testing

- Low-fidelity examples

allows for speed and collaboration inside Design Department

- Uncovered issues with onboarding, navigation, and search

Interaction testing

- Rapid prototypes allows stakeholders and subject-mater experts to validate changes to workflows

Design patterns

- Create, read, update, a delete had a consistent pattern emerge across all applications

With the Frame Design System finished, the final design had changes to colors, fonts, and branding, but also a Task list performed better with users than a dashboard

Document management was also improved by utilizing atomic design patterns for banner, tabs, and cards. Finding and favoriting any piece of data was now easier

We received a lot of positive feedback from users, who really saw the benefits of wireframe prototyping pay off with speedy QA and User Acceptance Testing

Alternative Investments was a keystone project, being the first leverage a new platform, OpsWorX, new Design System, and finally a modern workflow with Artificial Intelligence

Results

67% increase in processing speed and peace of mind

Massive gains in productivity are good for business, but so is the reduction in worker's cognitive load, job training time and costs. Completing, and managing the workload gives Associates and Managers the confidence that they performing well, increasing customer satisfaction as well as business goals.

Take-away

What we learned along the way

Having a Design Workshop sets the vision for the future and it must come from the people who do the work. That vision is the key to modernizing applications for the new OpsWorX platform quickly. Together, we all examined the current workflows with the users so we could identify, define or eliminate problems together.