CONTEXT
The company came to Salesforce to help define and create a vision for a new financial advisor platform. It will be a one single place for advisors to conduct market research, portfolio construction and proposal generation. It will help advisors receive proactive insights through a next generation interface.
CHALLENGE
Advisors on the current platform find its services to be disjointed across departments, which makes it difficult to navigate and manage data to service their clients. Meanwhile, wholesalers continue to struggle to establish meaningful connections with Advisors.
In the past, The company’s product team has been working on a few feature based initiatives in-house but struggle to move things fast as they want.
We believe that, with our team’s expertise in design and research, we can pull up a 4 week quick project, including a 3 day design sprint, bring together the stakeholders, and ideate, prototype, and test quickly.
PROJECT OUTCOME
Our client was very impressed with how quickly everything turned out. By the end of the 8 weeks, we learned tons about the advisors, aligned on initiatives to work on for the internal stakeholders, as well as a realistic looking and ready-too-test prototype for further testing. The client even signed up for another project to work on other parts of their products!
My learnings? I LOVE design sprints! I love how fast paced it is and how quickly everyone was forced to make decisions in the room :) I also learned best ways to quickly make a prototype that’s easy to change and is convincing as well for the testers.
Design a platform that better serves the financial advisors
I designed a facilitated a three day Design Sprint Workshop with my project partner for a wealth management company.
RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
As key learnings start to bubble up, we put them into 5 opportunity areas and brought them into the 3 day design sprint workshop. The rich research learnings serve as the meat for our discussion and ideation
THE DESIGN SPRINT
We think that design sprint is a great way to bring key stakeholders together, make decisions and prototype and test quickly. We used the “Design Sprint” book by Google Ventures as our guide.
We modified it into a three day workshop, due to the availability of the client’s attendees. We learned so much in such a condensed timeframe. Everyone in the room(15) was engaging.
The most exciting part is when we bring our prototypes in front of the advisors to test them out.
The executives in the other room who were watching this were totally blew away by the conversations!
It became a huge success that the client couldn’t wait to do another one for other parts of their customer experience journey!
PROTOTYPE MVP
With the feedback on the prototype, we start to map out the MVP product and make it into a more refined format. This is to push the prototype further for future testing. The architecture map shows where we are focus our time on building for an MVP (marked by stars).
USER RESEARCH AND IDEATION SESSION
We interviewed 12 stakeholders, 6 SMB owners, and 22 managers from small to medium size business. I synthesized the learnings and created workshop posters about our research insights. I facilitated discussions and ideations with the folks in the room.
It was a very engaging and successful workshop experience. People from different departments came together and aligned on a single vision.
THE JOURNEY MAP
I designed this journey map for our final presentation with the company’s CEO. It shows how all touchpoints connect between customers and backend staff. The vision was clearly backed by our research insights and workshop learnings. We printed and mounted the map onto giant foam-core boards. The Salesforce team and the CEO had very productive conversations.
