Finn Tech
The Challenge
The financial advisor wants to focus their time on building stronger relationships with their current clients, but feels frustrated by the long time consuming process required to gain new clients. When financial advisors meet with a potential client, the advisor will gather the new client’s data and develop a customized recommendation for them. This process can take several days and requires time to gain the new client’s trust.
Role: UX Researcher
Team: Product manager, software engineer, and graphic designer
Duration: 3 weeks
Project Goal
Identify the pain points in completing admin related tasks for financial advisors and planners
Identify the ideal type of financial advisor and planner for Finn Tech App
Develop recommendations to improve features of Finn Tech App
My Responsibilities
Review and edit interview questions
Schedule and facilitate individual zoom interviews with 5 financial advisors
Moderate usability testing of prototype with a team member
Present key findings to stakeholders with team
Market Research
We conducted an initial market research about the financial advisor industry and the services they provide to their clients. There are various types of financial advisors that ranges from experience level, team size, and speciality. We narrowed the wide scope of users to a specific set of financial advisors and we were able to identify our target user group would be advisors that were experienced in years with a general focus. This helped us to pinpoint who the Finn Tech App would best serve and the ways we can improve the features to make it more applicable to their work.
Individual Interviews
We wanted to learn more about our users and decided to conduct 1 hour individual interviews with 5 financial advisors that met our target group of users. During the interview, we asked questions to understand the behavior and needs of the advisors. We structured the interviews to test our prototype and captured the participants responses.
Key Takeaways
Individuals belonging to smaller firms spend several more hours weekly on admin related tasks
Advisors utilize various softwares and online tools to help reduce time on admin related tasks
Advisors believe recommendations should be made specifically for each client and be customizable
Advisors liked the interface and how they’re touch points with the clients to strengthen a sense of partnership
Prototype testing shows complying with BI practices is not a general concern within the Finn Tech App
Discovering User Needs
After conducting the interviews with financial advisors, I took notes from their responses and interpreted them. I captured their reactions through the prototype testing and several of the user’s made notable quotes. Including the notable quotes helped strengthen the user’s perspective to the design team.
After gaining a deeper understanding of each of the advisors, I reorganized the notes to portray a summary of the results. I wanted to be concise and objective, but still tell the story of the users in a simple way to stakeholders. Here were a few of our results:
2 out of 5 users liked the story feature
4 out of 5 users believe Finn Tech App will save them time
5 out of 5 users did not feel concerned about for BI practices
5 out of 5 users believe recommendations must be editable
Pain Points
Credibility in Finn Tech App
Recommendations are typical or standard, but requires specificity
Relationship building is lost if an app replaces your interactions
Needs
Needs more transparency in the formulas being used
Needs to be able to edit and make recommendations more customizable to cater clients
Needs opportunities of reviewing plans and making decisions together to build trust in the financial planner
Problem & Solution
Financial advisors want to maintain and gain new clients while managing their time efficiently. Conducting research with the target Finn Tech App users allowed us to discover their pain points and needs. As a result, we were able to meet our client’s expectations and provide a solution that influences the design of the product and ultimately prioritizes the user’s needs.
