Creating a long-term vision
Since the autumn of 2019 I have worked as a consultant at Svea Ekonomi. During my time there I have assisted Svea
with designing their inhouse platform that is used by everyone from customer support to loan officers. My main focus has been
to make the system more effective, reliable and coherent for the loan officers that handle private loans and mortgages.
The system has existed for a long time and during the years a lot of new rules and new features have been added. This has
resulted in a quite big and complex system that is more or less a big database. The user can find all the information they
need, but the design will not give the user any support in the task that they are doing.
During this project I have the luck of working very closely with the developers and users making the iterations very quick and
swift. I can talk to the users, identify an issue, find a solution, test it on the users, discuss it with the developers and
have it up and running, all in the same day. Even with bigger design problems it is an incredible strength to work so closely
with each other. Getting quick feedback from the users and using the developers as a sounding board about how to solve the issue.
The complexibility of tht system makes it difficult to release bigger design updates. It is like working with a big ball of tangled
yarn for the developers. If you pull in the yarn somewhere you can be sure that the part that you are working with is connected with
problems in at least 10 other places. And it is the same for the users, they are used to the system working in a specific way and one
morning when they arrive at work everything looks different. To avoid this we have tried to work with small continuous changes making
it easier for both the developers and for the users. But to make this work it is very important to have a clear vision for a long-term
goal that the team can aim for. Every small change in the system should be towards the long-term goal making it important for both
the UX-designer and the developers to share the same vision.
To collect data and get a better insight in how the users are interacting with the system I used a mix of ethnographic studies, user
interviews and by reading the descriptions how the different tasks are done. After analysing the data I designed prototypes of different
fidelitys. Finely showing the new designs to the users, the product owner and developers to get feedback and collect more data. This
process is then iterated to take the system one step closer to where we want it to be. The minor issues and problems that are identified
during this process are presented to the developers to be fixed right away. Meanwhile the solutions for the bigger design flaws are
planned for the future and are added for the vision for the long-term goal.
Take a look at the XD prototype
Another big part of this project has been to map the loan officers work tasks and to investigate the whole journey from when Svea gets a loan
request till the loan is paid out. There is really no one that has a full view of how the whole process works or has an idea of how it should be.
The general philosophy normally sounds like “Well we have always done it this way”, although no one knows why. To investigate this further I used
y collected data and created Journey maps to pin out this complex process. With the Journey maps printed out I could then talk to the users,
product owners and the developers and see if they thought that the different parts looked correct
