How to improve scheduling meetings for business advisors
A case study for Handelsbanken
Time
3 weeks
Responsibility
UX research and design
Methods
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In-depth interviews with users and stakeholders
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User task analysis
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Value Proposition Canvas
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Concept sketching
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Digital prototypes
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Usability testing
About Handelsbanken
Handelsbanken is one of the largest banks in the Nordic region and offers a wide range of financial services for companies and private individuals, traditional business services, investment banking, financing, trading, investment in equity and fixed income markets and personal insurance.
Project Background
Most financial advisers at Handelsbanken use an internally developed service called RÅD as support when advising clients. In November 2019, Handelsbanken launched a service for business financial advisors in which they could book and plan meetings within RÅD.
Handelsbanken developed this functionality for booking meetings so that their financial business advisers could follow up meetings they had with their clients.
Goal
The goal of this project was to create improvements to the existing design solution that would lead to increased understanding, fewer mistakes and increased use of the service.
My Role
This project was for my final thesis during my internship at Handelsbanken. As such, I was responsible for all the research, ideation, and prototyping.
Throughout the project, I’ve been working closely with the users and stakeholders from Handelsbanken to ensure that the design was user-centred and with business value.
PROCESS
WEEK ONE
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Create research objectives
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Recruit users for interviews
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Create interview goals
WEEK TWO
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In-depth interviews
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Analyse data
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Define problem
- Choose direction
- Validate direction
- Recruit users for usability tests
WEEK THREE
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Ideate
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Prototype
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Usability testing
- Evaluation
RESEARCH AND EMPATHISE
Create research objectives
It was essential to establish well-defined research objectives to create a focus for the research. Since this project started as an explorative research project, I created these objectives by identifying where I lacked knowledge of the users’ needs and behaviours.
Understand the advisor’s process of booking appointments, beginning with the planning of a meeting, continuing through what happens after their meetings. What are the decisions the advisors need to make, and why?
What tools do advisors use when planning meetings, booking meetings and documenting meetings. Do the tools available meet their needs?
Identify the issues advisors encounter in their process.
In-depth interviews
To achieve the research objectives, I constructed the interviews so that each meeting consisted of two parts.
The first part consisted of background questions to assess how experienced the adviser was.
The second part consisted of advisers demonstrating how they work when booking appointments. During this exercise, I examined patterns of how advisers used the bank's services.
"It [using Råd] adds an extra step when planning meetings that aren't a requirement so I just don't use it"
Quote from user interview, translated from Swedish
Interview conclusions
When analysing the interviews it was clear that the service was used in a different way than initially designed for. None of the advisors I interviewed used RÅD in preparation for their meetings. Instead, they used external services like their email client and Skype for Business. Some advisors had however found value in documenting their meetings in RÅD after the meeting had occurred.
To visualise this, I did a task analysis that I grouped in "in preparation of the meeting", "during a meeting", and "after a meeting”. I showed the expected behaviour, which I established in stakeholder interviews, alongside the behaviour observed during the interviews.
DEFINE AND IDEATION
After finalising interviews and analysis, I find it insightful to validate the findings directly with users. In this phase, I define the direction and do follow up discussions with users. In the discussions, we go through the decided direction for the project so that I can do iterations on this if needed and get a further understanding of the user needs. I also do this to check any bias I bring into interviews and analysis.
Which road should we take?
I created a prioritisation matrix with our possible directions which we then used to identify where there was most need of support in the user journey.
We decided to lean into the behaviour that I had seen the users use when using RÅD which was for their post documentation of meetings and further that support even more.
We hoped that if we made improvements on the post documentation process we could at the same time raise more awareness for the service and function for the planning stages of the meeting and as such improve several of the user’s needs as well as stakeholder’s goals.
Value Proposition Canvas
I used the Value Proposition Canvas method and template from Stratygizer.
Based on the analysis of the interviews, I was able to put together insights into users' pains, gains and jobs to be done.
I then used the finished canvas in the ideation phase to create the first concepts.
These early concepts were tested by having discussions with users and getting feedback on what worked and what didn't.
PROTOTYPE AND TEST
To finalise this project I created interactive prototypes in Figma with the intention of continued testing and iterations on the design and concept.
The focus was on improving the user flow of adding post documentation of meetings as well as showcasing the service as an assistant to setting up and planning meetings.
Due to the time limit of this project, only one test was completed and as such couldn't make any significant findings.
