Aligning Legacy & Startup Stakeholders to Modernize a Fintech Brand & Experience.
User Research & Design Strategy Lead, 5 month engagement
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Generative & Evaluative Interviews | Ambition Workshop | Personas | Journey Mapping |
In-person Research Immersion & Concept Creation
Context
Bridging Legacy and Modernity: Redesigning the Customer Experience for a Global B2B Payment Provider
A global B2B international payment provider spun off a legacy financial institution and sought to modernize the customer experience. We quickly learned the challenge went much deeper than creating a future state vision for customer experience—we also needed to align legacy and new company stakeholders on a new brand experience while bridging 8 legacy technology platforms, serving very different customer needs, into one dynamic, intuitive experience.
Approach
People
To navigate the complexities of aligning leaders who had worked at the legacy brand for 40+ years with those who were a few years in wanting to build a start-up, I facilitated an ambition workshop for these leaders to align on their ‘desired ingredients for the new soup,’ creating a new brand personality. We also ensured legacy employees felt like owners of the experience through adjusting our tone and cadence.
Systems
Before beginning employee and customer in-depth interviews, we built trust with employee SMEs and gained platform knowledge through casual learning sessions. In these sessions, SMEs shared the front and back-end experience of each of the different platforms as well as their own frustrations with the experiences, which helped me gain working hypotheses for what to test in future IDIs.
Experience
With a working hypothesis of themes that needed to be embedded in the new experience (e.g. –transparency, simplicity), I led over 30 generative and evaluative IDIs involving employees, customers, and executives using competitor platforms to understand pains of the current experience and test initial screen designs. These IDIs informed 2 rounds of insights for a future state brand and technology experience. We shared these insights in various research immersion workshops and used them to co-create a future state journey involving 3 unique customer personas.
Outome
Within the 2-day research immersion & MVP workshop, we aligned on ‘now, next, and later’ features to prioritize for the future state MVP, taking a wide array of customer needs into account, in essence, ‘building the first tree in the forest.’ I also worked with our designers to create multiple future-state screens derived from research insights. Most importantly, through immersing the client team in the research and allowing them to act as owners, we gained their trust and wereapproached for future phases of work.
Throughout the 2 day in-person workshop in Phase 2, the client team ‘walked the walls’ to share their feedback on the research and broke up into groups to create new concepts for the future experience.
MVP features were mapped out in a ‘Now, Next, and Later” roadmap with key stakeholders on day 2 of the workshop.