Bizminer

An end-to-end UX design project for a SaaS company that provides industry financial data and reporting tools.

Their product is widely used by business students at universities, financial professionals, and business advisors.

Overview

Problem

Bizminer recently underwent a product relaunch to introduce new offerings and improve the user experience. Legacy users had issues with the new interface and the client wanted to gain insights about which user flows needed improvement.

Outcome

I created a high fidelity prototype deliverable based on customer interview findings. The solution was a simplified product offering and an improved user flow for their financial research tool.

My Role: UX Designer

I worked with my design team to interview stakeholders and customers. I created sketches, low-fidelity wireframes, and a high-fidelity prototype in Figma iteratively with feedback from my design team.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

Client Interview

To kick off the project, I collaborated with a group of designers to interview Bizminer stakeholders including Danny Burke, CEO and Nolan Walker, VP of Product. I designed this meeting to:

  • Understand our client’s business goals and challenges with their recent relaunch.

  • Learn what they know about their customers and what knowledge gaps they might have.

  • Gain insight on their product direction to create alignment with design goals for the project.

RESEARCH METHODS

Customer Interviews

Participants were provided from the client and were current users of Bizminer. I drafted interview scripts and collaborated with other UX Designers to interview customers remotely through Zoom. In total, 9 Bizminer customers were interviewed.

Competitive Analysis

I performed a competitive analysis of companies that were identified by the Bizminer team during our stakeholder meeting. These included Industrious CFO, Business Reference Guide, and Uplead. This analysis helped to provide insights on how Bizminer compared in the marketspace, and provided a knowledge base for when we performed customer interviews.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Insights

After performing customer interviews, I synthesized the results through affinity mapping in Miro. I was able deduce themes and draw insights from this exercise. Some of the key insights included those listed below.

Customers had uncertainty with drop downs in the industry financial tool.

When users went to make their selections, they were unsure if they had completed their selection. This was because visually there were no indicators of completion.

If they had made an error with their filter selections, they weren’t sure how to recover.

Users don’t feel like the interface is intuitive.

There is currently a tour for the website, but those that took it reported that they still needed to either teach themselves or consult another member of their team for help.

Customers were uncertain of the status of their actions.

When clicking download, customers were uncertain if their report was downloading. It was also unclear if they made all the selections needed to download a report.

DESIGN

Wireframes

After getting feedback on my sketches, I created some low fidelity wireframes in Figma. These wireframes went through multiple rounds of feedback from other UX Designers. Throughout the process, I made changes to my design.

I received feedback on my first low fidelity wireframe that having everything on one screen, might cause overwhelm for users. I modified the design to have a screen for each step in the customer journey to reduce the user’s cognitive load. I also added a progress bar on the left side of the screen to show visibility of status.

Sketches

After completing interviews and a competitor analysis, I made some initial sketches. The goals of these were to brainstorm solutions about how to remove the uncertainties customers are feeling with visibility of status and the filtering process. I received feedback from my mentor, a Senior UX Designer before moving on to drafting wireframes in Figma.

After this iteration, I tested my design in Usability Hub. Users in testing didn’t confidently know what step they were at in the filter process when progress bar on the left hand side. After getting this feedback, I redesigned the progress bar location so that it was on the top of the page reading left to right. This made the progress bar more visible to users in testing and they felt more confident knowing where they were in the filtering process.

Final Design Solution

The final design solution had the following improvements:

Ability for users to easily clear dropdowns

Visibility of status throughout the users journey including slider bars, report download progress bar, and filtering progress bar

Educational notes throughout the filtering process

Feedback from Stakeholders

“The weight graph is a fantastic point. Tying that in to give our customers an understanding of the selection process, was a great insight.”

-Danny Burke, CEO & President of Bizminer

“The data visualization you designed really helped [users] with making a decision before testing a selection to see what the results are.”

-Nolan Walker, VP of Product at Bizminer

THINGS I’VE LEARNED

I am grateful for the opportunity to work on project like this and have learned a lot from it. A few of the highlights of what I learned are below.

1. Don’t make the user think too much.

Reducing the cognitive load of the user can create a more pleasant experience. This can be done be having less information on their screen, showing what their progress is upfront and center so they don’t have to remember what they did.

2. Keep learning and keep refining your craft.

Looking back on some of the earlier versions of my designs for this project and how they progressed, I realize how much my UI and UX skills have improved since the beginning of the project. As I continue to get projects under my belt, things will continue to improve. Small iterations over time, truly add up.

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