research

Stakeholder Interviews

Background

HelloWallet was acquired by KeyBank in July 2017. We were established as the Financial Wellness line of business, tasked with creating engaging products and services that can help KeyBank clients improve their financial lives. One of these products was known as Guided Wellness Interactions (GWI), a robust, analytically-enabled experience championed by executives. The experience we were asked to build was complex and it was unclear how it would help the business. In January 2017, I asked senior leadership to give me a week to conduct a series of interviews with project stakeholders in an effort to 1) establish a unified project vision and goal, 2) define success, and 3) understand challenges and constraints.

Objective

Meet with executive stakeholders across KeyBank to better understand the business and client goals they hope to address with GWI. Primary questions to answer included:

• What is the stakeholder’s role or level of involvement with the project?

• Who are our target users?

• What is the problem for the market/client that this product is going to solve? How do we know that this is a problem for clients?

• What will this project accomplish for the business?

• Who do you think is driving the vision for this project?

Methodology

One hour remote and in-person interviews with the following executives:

• Head of Retail Transformation

• Head of Financial Wellness

• Senior Manager, Wellness Science

• VP Branch Wellness Experience

• SVP Retail Client Strategy

• Head of Retail Branch Network

• Head of Digital

Findings

After synthesizing all the interview data, I found that stakeholders were aligned on why we needed GWI, but not on what the solution should be. We decided that we needed to set up working sessions with stakeholders throughout February to quickly address outstanding questions and concerns as well as build alignment. The biggest win from this research was that stakeholders understood that they needed to step back and let the product squad determine what the solution should be versus dictating one and having them build it out. As a result, the product squad was given more autonomy on how the problem should be solved, which allowed them to accelerate towards a solution that was ultimately rolled-out to branches in October 2017.

BANKER INTERVIEWS

Background

The Guided Conversations squad was tasked with creating an experience in which clients can receive personalized and guided recommendations in-branch, online (self-service) and in the contact center. The first phase of this work was to create a digital experience in which bankers can help clients enter information about their financial profile and get an assessment of areas they need to work on. Initial designs of this experience were inspired by an existing paper guide used in KeyBank branches known as the Financial Wellness Review Guide.

Objective

The goal of this study was to obtain feedback from bankers on the existing Financial Wellness Review process as well as gain preliminary insights on three early concepts of Guided Conversations. Primary questions to answer included:

• How do bankers feel about the existing Financial Wellness Review Guide?

• What is the bankers current flow/process for the financial wellness review conversation?

• How will bankers react to the three different design concepts and the recommendation screen?

• Do bankers believe the concept design(s) will make the financial wellness review process easier or harder?

Methodology

We ran this testing with bankers from different branches/regions. Each banker was shown early designs of what the Financial Wellness Review Guide 2.0 could look like. We ran this research with:

• One remote interviewer (member of the Design team)

• One remote note-taker (member of the Design team)

• One in-person observer that helped identify bankers and schedule the session (member of the E2E Employee Experience team)

Guided Conversation Concepts

Click on each concept below to learn more.

Findings

We synthesized all of the interview data into an affinity diagram. Affinity diagrams help turn research into evidence-based recommendations by allowing the team to identify patterns and useful insights. To create the diagram, we:

• Wrote down observations from each banker interview

• Organized the observations into clusters

• Identified the overarching user need for each cluster

The user needs helped me create actionable design principles to help guide the team as they designed Guided Conversations.

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE

BACKGROUND

The Product Team was at a crossroads in Spring 2017. Two years after the acquisition, we were not seeing sufficient engagement with HelloWallet and it was still unclear how HelloWallet would fit in the broader Morningstar product ecosystem. We thought this would be a good time to reevaluate HelloWallet’s value proposition to bring it inline with Morningstar products, and more importantly, understand whether it was actually helping our users obtain financial well-being. We decided to use the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to accomplish this task. My role was to help assist the User Research Lead with this study.

Objective

The goal of this study was to understand what problems HelloWallet is solving for our users and use that information to redefine our value proposition.

Research Questions

• Why do users hire HelloWallet?

• Why do users fire/abandon HelloWallet?

• What events led users to make a hire/fire decision?

• What are the main forces (motivations, anxieties) that drive users to hire/fire HelloWallet?

• How do users feel about the hire/fire decision?

• What new solution/product did users substitute HelloWallet with?

Methodology

• 45-60 minute interviews with 6 current and 6 former HelloWallet users

• We recruited users that represented a diverse mix of age, gender, education, financial status, location, household size and income

Findings

After completing the interviews, we:

• Created journeys for each user following the JTBD timeline

• Synthesized our data and created nine job stories that reflected our users’ social, functional and emotional needs

• Identified positive and negative forces that pushed/pulled users from our product, as well as their pains, gains and unmet needs

• Our findings helped inform product strategy and helped foster a sense of ownership over outcomes

In Retrospect

Things that went well:

• We were able to learn and apply a new research method fairly quickly

• Given this was a new research method, the team was flexible with their time and help throughout the entire effort

• All hands were on deck to make sure this research effort was a success

• We were able to quickly identify and employ tools to support remote testing

Things that did not go well:

• We had less control over the interview since they were all conducted remotely

• There was a delay in project kick-off as we were trying to determine roles and responsibilities

• We were responsible for the entire recruitment process, which was time consuming

HelloWallet was acquired by KeyBank while we were wrapping up this research. Although we were not able to use our findings to improve HelloWallet, we used the job stories to help inform financial wellness features that we designed and released in online banking as well as a financial wellness assessment product that was rolled out to branches in October 2018.