information architecture + experience design
the Situation
For financial institutions, differentiation is critical. There's not going to be a huge difference in a retirement analysis from one firm versus another. If the same data goes in, roughly the same data comes out.
The exception? The story the firm is telling. And even in the digital age, one of the most important bearers of that messaging is the paper report an advisor gives to their client.
To better meet these report customization needs, I worked with an R&D software team to develop a feature that would enable a small set of our financial planning application’s users to create and deploy report templates to their entire organization. The vision was to eventually scale the tool to include all of the organization-wide activities those same users might need to do.
We had already designed the navigation and the “create” component of the tool - but what about the “deploy” half of the requirements? As the tool scaled, should users deploy their changes from each individual section, or from a centralized deployment location?
Step #1
To answer that question, I began by discussing both options with the team to ensure I was accounting for all the different business and technical requirements. There were valid business cases on both sides, and from a technical standpoint both options were about equal.
Early navigation sketches
Step #2
So I turned to the experts: Jakob Nielson’s ten heuristics for interface design. After considering all the business and technical aspects of this IA decision, I needed to make sure I considered all the elements of experience. The clearest way to start was to compare the two options on each individual heuristic.
Step #3
The clear winner from an individual comparison was centralized deployment. From here, I took a step back to consider the big picture and our top priorities.
Not all heuristics are weighted equally for every project. For this admin tool, I identified the highest priority as “error prevention.” If users are making changes that will affect their entire organization - potentially thousands of other users - a mistake could be magnified thousands of times.
Creating a centralized deployment page would provide the clarity and rigor around that process needed to help users avoid costly errors. Whereas the rest of the admin tool was consciously designed to mirror familiar processes (the navigation and template building UI, for example), this deployment page would stand alone as a unique design with a specific and easily recognizable purpose.
Segment of a quick mock-up
Step #4
The final step was communication: making my recommendation to the team. My heuristic evaluation spreadsheet made it easy to step through and explain my rationale, and after some discussion about the mock-up, we agreed collectively to develop the centralized page..
Seemingly small information architecture decisions - even those with valid business cases on either side - can have a huge impact for users, and they’re worth taking the time to fully understand from both a highly focused and a big picture perspective.