‘Advisor’ Experience Research
Project Specs
Client Contacts: Director, Insight & Product Experience
Project Team: 2 Project Leads (Client Relations), 4 UX Designers, 1 Project Manager, 3 Business Experts, 1 Technical Expert
Timeline: 6 weeks
My Role: Co-led user research, synthesis, and documentation
Programs: Figma, Mural, PowerPoint, Excel
The Challenge
A large, Canadian financial services company has a roster of 10,000+ third-party insurance advisors who are licensed to sell its insurance products, but only 40% do so, instead choosing policies from their competitors. To determine how they could activate these advisors, we completed a six-week discovery project to understand the holistic experience of advisors and the cohorts who they work with most closely. From these findings, we would have to generate a prioritized list of opportunities for the company to pursue.
Approach
In-Depth User Interviews
We conducted more than 30 interviews with advisors, as well other key stakeholders that they work with, such as Managing General Agents. These hour-long interviews their existing work habits and behaviors, but also touched on the ideal future state that we could help bring to life.
Synthesizing Findings as a Group
After each interview, the UX team met internally to record the key insights on a Mural board that everyone on the project team could access. At the end of each day, we also held informal check-ins with the full project team so that we could share new findings and clarify topics as they emerged.
Brainstorming with ‘How Might We’ Statements
Once we had finished the interviews, we had to come up with a list of opportunities for the client to pursue based on our findings. We did this through a brainstorming session with the full internal team, which involved coming up with as many “How Might We” statements as possible based on the insights already recorded on our shared Mural board. The final step was drafting opportunities to address the “How Might We” statements, and fitting them within the relevant stage of a journey map.
Using a Quantitative Framework to Prioritize Opportunities
Lastly, we organized the list of opportunities by assigning them each a score (from 1 to 3) across the dimensions of user impact, business value, and ease of implementation. Adding up the scores for each opportunity gave us a sense of their priority, which could then be used as a starting point for future discussions with the client.
Solution
Based on the interviews, we created 14 personas representing internal and external stakeholders. Each persona card included a summary of their role, as well as their goals, pain points, needs, most-used tools, values, and who they interact with most.
For each persona, we created a corresponding journey map. The maps illustrated the actions, touch points, people involved, sentiments, and pain points for the persona across each phase of the journey. In addition, we also displayed commentary on the maps: insights from our synthesis and related opportunities for the client to consider.
We translated the insights from the documentation into a list of 60+ opportunities for the client to pursue. We then scored each opportunity across three categories: user impact, and business value, and ease of implementation. This scoring framework prioritized the opportunities, setting the stage for future projects.
Feedback
This engagement led to Avanade continuing to grow its relationship with the client. Based on the recommendations surfaced from the research, Avanade began discussions about and stood up new advisory, content strategy, and technical workstreams.
Reflections
I believe the systems that we set up internally to coordinate across the project team were instrumental to the project’s success. We had a relatively large team, with each member bringing their own expertise, so it was a challenge to continually share what we were learning during the thick of the interview process. Meeting informally each day and maintaining shared documentation in real-time slowed us down in the short run. But in the long run, we were able to jump into the synthesis and ideation phase much more easily because everyone had the same baseline understanding of the insights from the interviews.
Summary of My Contributions
Helped create a research plan, interview guide, and documentation to capture findings
Led 15 interviews across cohorts and supported 15 interviews
Synthesized findings from the research in Mural
Summarized insights into overarching themes in PowerPoint
Helped create seven detailed personas and journey maps in Figma, and corresponding summary/highlights slides
Helped to generate a list of 60+ opportunities for the client to pursue, which were prioritized by user and business need in Excel
Presented a section of the final presentation to the client