Search and secrets in finance

LexisNexis provide business and legal support to the finance sector. The products I worked on were Nexis Diligence and Nexis Entity Insight. Their chief aims were to find, investigate, review and monitor companies and suppliers - essentially providing due diligence.

Managing risk is a prime requirement in finance and these two products serve that need.

Outcomes

1. Search
   An early hypothesis I came to was that products succeed or fail on their search performance. So this became a key focus for me, revisiting the design of this page, reviewing previous research and testing new designs. My new designs were positively received by the whole team and the global lead. They will be rolled out in upcoming sprints.

2. A new vision
   I was asked by the team lead to create a vision of the product - to push the envelope with technology while balancing the user requirements. I presented my XD prototype across the company to wide acclaim, generating real optimism and excitement.

3. Data driven decisions

   We used Pendo to uncover what users were doing across their product journey. I took the lead in promoting this tool by tagging, analysing and presenting findings to the team. Page use, drop off points and heat maps, to name just three insights were all helpful to challenge assumptions with evidence and make sure new additions added value.

4. Voice of the product
   A good designer also looks at content. I think this is influenced by my time at the BBC and the Science Museum when I wrote and signed-off editorial. On ‘Nexis Diligence’ the tone felt friendly and helpful but verbose. I found that our customers, who are mostly highly time sensitive wanted to get in, find the info and get out, not have a chat. So, I spoke to the team and worked with the talented content writer to begin to make the text more concise, present a cleaner page and remove repetition.

5. Align with other LexisNeixs products

   It struck me early on that we had a suite of great products but they tended to look and do things slightly differently. That’s not good, for the customers, the developers, or me. I started to take the best bits that were tried and tested by my colleagues and apply them to my products.

6. Pattern library in XD.

   I was the first UX designer to start to roll this out, migrating from Axure to XD. This also helped to align with the US products and company branding, and we could now draw on single shareable assets.

Challenges

1. Migration
   I joined the team while a content migration was taking place and a new design was bedding in. This presented the challenge of being sensitive to users undergoing change - release and update fatigue was evident, the customer wanted to simply get on with their work. By establishing closer contact with the user, interviews especially helped, we continued to release updates but with smaller, non-disruptive enhancements.

2. Access to the user
   This was undoubtedly the biggest challenge. Due to the secrecy of LexisNexis’s clients they were unsure about screen-sharing and office visits. I overcame this by running a set of interviews with internal ‘customer success managers’ - not the voice of the user but the best next thing. I continually pushed to meet, interview and observe the customers.

3. UX Researcher
   The UX Researcher I was paired with changed a few times. This was unfortunate so I stepped in to do my own user research.

4. Boolean search
   Understanding search parameters AND, OR, NOT and wildcards.

Collaboration

1. Fancy a coffee?
   Several products were being worked on around me by talented UX teams. I regularly asked to see what they were working on, to break down silos and bring a shared solution across the suite of products. An example of this is the dashboard design - other tools were ahead of mine and the lessons they learnt could be applied to my designs.

2. Openness
   I spoke to ‘customer success managers’, the sales team, even visited people on other floors of the building. There was so much untapped knowledge around the office and everyone was delighted to be consulted and have some input.

3. Team spirit
   This is really important to me and I suggested a floor wall chart, with picture and job title, so I would know what all the valuable people do working around me. I was keen to hear about other products and encouraged the team leader to arrange product presentations.

4. Project handover
   Due to the complexity of the industry and the challenges of customer access I was keen to get my handover right. We had around three weeks to do this, mostly remotely but I overcame this with regular calls, both verbal and written handovers and a gentle scaling up of responsibility.