Going beyond the numbers with business owners
Challenge:
Help the Finance team at a large organization improve the usage of its monthly financial statements to its ~20K franchise business owners in North America
Identify ways to support these business owners in making more informed decisions to optimize the financial health (i.e., profitability) of their businesses
Approach:
Facilitate design thinking activities & empathy building research across multiple disciplines to foster user-centered problem-solving, ideation, & concept development
Identify existing assumptions & current state landscape from stakeholders & SMEs
Collect baseline measures of current usage & perceptions of the monthly financial statements from users
Uncover underlying user motivations & barriers that influence usage & perceptions of the monthly financial statements
Co-create directly with users to ensure any design concept remained desirable in their experience
Co-create directly with designers, stakeholders, & SMEs to ensure any design concept remained viable & feasible to develop & implement
Deliver a Now/Next/Later roadmap for product rollout over the next 1-5 years
Moment of Clarity (Solution):
Use of B Fogg Behavior Model to frame pain points & opportunities with stakeholders & SMEs on multiple teams
Demonstrate how these franchise business owners are motivated to use the monthly financial statements they receive but struggle because they don’t necessarily have the knowledge or ability to easily/ intuitively use them
Emphasize how these business owners are confident in who they are and what they do; they want help to know what they should consider in the complex, multi-faceted decisions they make for their businesses
Consider equipping users with more than just an easy to read, easy to navigate monthly financial statement to further elevate their future experience; bigger opportunity identified to support business owners who are in critical stages of growth & profitability
Impact:
Conceptualized an integrated digital solution (consisting of 4 products) to encourage & enable usage of the monthly financial statements through direct learning & application of its information all in one place
Co-created a business case for senior leaders that resulted in approval & prioritization of the full concept in the strategic roadmap & secured resources for development
Empathy-building with senior leaders & multi-disciplinary teams through participatory research & design activities
Role: Research Lead/Strategic Consultant
Led scoping, planning, execution, & delivery of research work
Consulted on wireframes, capabilities list, & prioritized roadmap for each of the 4 products
Collaborated on a multi-disciplinary team which included designers, analysts, business owners, GPs, & technical SMEs
Timing: 7 months