Data Mapping Feature

Overview

Summary

This tool is part of a full suite of an enterprise financial application for one of the big four auditing firms. It will be used for users who are tracking and mapping investment data together from an excel import. These users also need to be able to easily extract data from a pdf document through a third party application while also gaining visibility into what extractions are complete and what are still in review.

The Problem

Analysts need to be able to connect investments to funds within their engagement. They also need to be able to extract attributes from financial statements they upload and connect those reports to investments within their engagement. At this time, there is no way to efficiently automate the alignment of investments, funds and statements available. It is purely just an extract. Users would like to be able to track their progress with high level visibility so that their task could be handled more efficiently.

Process

User Research

I began my research process with evaluating the problem and the business needs. Most of my communication with the client was conducted remotely with stakeholders as this is an external company, so we had multiple calls discussing the who, the what, why and how of this new application. These conversations helped me gain an understanding of what currently exists and what improvements they are asking for. I also reached out to leaders of teams who would be using this tool and sent them a survey of questions to answer so that I could gain more insight into each team’s pain points and goals they want to achieve. From this information, I then developed personas to help me guide the design.

Flow

There were a few other applications that they wanted to model certain components of this tool after, so I reached out to QA for walkthroughs of these other tools to gain more insight into what they are looking for. Putting all of this information together helped me to understand priority actions and data to represent, whiteboard out my thoughts and get started on the new user journey flow.

Wireframes

I went through many iterations of wireframes to nail down the core experience. A few examples of the latest lo-fi visuals are displayed below:

Execution

The Handoff

As a member of a full stack team, my research and low fidelity concept design work was complete. It was then handed off to a designer who built this design into high fidelity prototypes following our design system. The feedback received from our stakeholders and users through surveys have greatly impacted the changes being made on this feature as well as other features within the suite. As this feature is part of an entire suite re-design, elements used here are adopted elsewhere as well.

Results and Lessons Learned

My responsibility was to learn what data needed to be displayed on the feature's dashboard, and develop the layout that would guide the user through the necessary flow to complete tasks while meeting both business requirements and user goals. This goal was met.
Since this was a fairly new concept, there were mulitple functionality roadblocks that I overcame during the planning phase. This was achieved by setting up discussions with developers working on the feature's funtionality, and discussing the existing process with QA to get a more clear understanding of our technical limitations. Moving forward, further conversations with developers and QA in the infancy stages of research would be the most effective way to identify more of our strict limitations in the design.