Let's get this project started!
The AJ Bell Investcentre platform is where advisers manage potentially millions of pounds on behalf of their clients – so the projects we work on are often complex.
When starting work on a new project, how do we navigate the information we’re given to deliver the best experience to our users? We host a workshop to hear from all the relevant voices!
A UX-facilitated kick-off workshop can be as simple as a half-hour session with a handful of people to a full day event with many areas of the business.
Regardless of the number of participants or the length of the session, the aim of the workshop is to understand the problems, discuss the solutions and prioritise the direction analysis and research take next.
At AJ Bell, we typically use a handful of tried-and-tested frameworks that help us reach the above goals.
We recently ran a workshop with one of our teams whose product is entirely offline (that is via email, phone, and paper forms). The project aim is to bring their proposition online, so we spent the day with their Product Development Manager, Client Relationship Manager and the project’s BAs. We discussed the elements of the proposition which were key to their business – the reasons their clients come back time and again – and then mapped out a journey which retained their ethos, but created a sensible, user-friendly experience for their users.
During the workshop, we used the SCAMPER methodology to challenge the inclusion and placement of every interaction in the journey. Put simply, SCAMPER allows us to decide whether we should:
SUBSTITUTE an element for something more relevant/helpful
COMBINE an element with another
ADAPT or MODIFY an element to make it more suitable to the task at hand
PUT AN ELEMENT TO ANOTHER USE by repurposing it
ELIMINATE an element completely if it’s overly complex or seldom used
REVERSE/REARRANGE the order of questions or sections to create a more logical flow.
This has allowed design to get started in earnest, and helped the BAs focus their analysis on what is truly important to the project.
For a couple of smaller projects, we’ve run shorter design thinking sessions, where we typically use the ‘Double Diamond’ model pioneered by the British Design Council more than 15 years ago. During these focused sessions, the project is broken down into two sections, each with two elements: in the first section, different business areas discuss their problems (either existing or perceived) in relation to the project, then the group works together to establish the ‘themes’ that these problems fall into. In the second section they take each theme in turn, putting forward solutions to resolve them, finishing by working together to prioritise the solutions which solve the problems, in order to deliver the overall project aim.
We used Double Diamond in a project aiming to replicate functionality from the older area of the site and move it into the new world – which uncovered some previously unknown challenges with the original implementation. Discussing these in an open forum allowed project stakeholders to get a better measure of the task at hand and gave rise to some other necessary work items which will benefit our users in the long run.
The second Double Diamond project aims to reduce risk in the business by bringing a task online. Lots of challenges surfaced, and lots of solutions were discussed. By circling back to the core aim of ‘reducing risk’, the project stakeholders have been able to prioritise the proposed delivery of the project, and in UX we can factor these incremental deliverables into the interfaces we design to ensure a cohesive experience throughout the entirety of the project.
Clearly identifying what we know internally about a project in its infancy forces us to think differently and informs how we plan our external user research. Internal knowledge sharing coupled with external user research provides a powerful way to help drive AJ Bell forward as the easiest platform to use.
By Claire, UX Designer