Stakeholders briefing
I started with a several interviews with product owner and key stakeholders, who were actually future users (customers) of the future platform. Those interviews helped me to answer main questions and to understand important aspects of the product that need to be built:
Why does company decide to invest time and money into developing own expensive platform instead of continuing to use existing similar tools on the market?
What are the high-level problems with using the current 3rd party monitoring platform?
Desired functionality and approximate structure of the platform.
Understanding customer’s needs
After gathering insights from product owner and key stakeholders, and a couple of brainstorm sessions, I faced the need to get users’ perspectives on the sparking opportunities raised as outcomes from my investigation.
To do so, in collaboration with our Product Owner, we came up with 3 days workshop, with interviews and activities.
User Interviews
The interview sample took into account men and women aged from 24 to 56, trading analysts and investment consultants, active employees of investment company. Each interview took approximately 30 minutes and included topics to get to the core of what users are trying to do and what their problems are. So I asked:
How do you search specific information (financial reports, news, e.t.c.)?
How users group, filter and access gathered information?
What information and, what functional as a result, is the most/least usable on day-to-day routine?
What annoys them while they using current monitoring patterns?
What would they change in their routine?
As a follow-up activity, a card sorting was performed, users were prompt to group cards with platform features into “must-have”, “better to have”, and “good to have” buckets.
Persona
Personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. We segmented all our possible users into 5 groups and I created a persona for each corresponding group. Here is one of them:
Contextual Inquiry
The next important research activity was contextual inquiry. Basically, I spent 2 days observing different traders and their professional routines. This activity provided me with enough observations, so I truly began to empathize with users and their perspectives.
Desk research
In addition, I researched major financial market monitoring platforms (especially the one they were using as a go-to platform in the company). Insights that I gathered from user interviews showed that some features are outstanding and users really like them as they are. The goal was to understand how those features work, so I would be able to use them in developing a platform.
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