DECISION: What do we focus on optimizing?
(Benchmarking consumer banking application)
Background:
Company licenses retail banking applications to financial institutions primarily in the US. We redesigned the Web app and Mobile apps through a collaboration with key clients and their end users. The team needed to establish usability standards and performance standards - also identify UX debt to prioritize against feature requests and capability enhancements.
ROLE : Director of UXR - leading team of $ UX Researchers
STAKEHOLDERS: Product Managers, UX Team, Engineering
TIMELINE: 6 Weeks
Challenge:
Decisions about where and how much to invest in burning down “UX debt” balanced with new feature and capability requests needed to be made. Product managers wanted a way to understand the impact of addressing certain UX recommendations that were filling up a backlog.
Methods:
I approached this as a “benchmarking” exercise after doing research into the practice of measuring UX health of a task based application over time. We identified tasks, ran a pilot on an existing product release to establish a baseline and then ran the same study on the newest release to measure the difference.
Results:
We learned the process of evaluating a product’s user experience by using metrics to gauge performance over a standard that was meaningful to the business was a good way to prioritize work and gain agreement that a percentage of resource should be dedicated to “UX debt”.