Portfolio: Interactive & Transactional Systems

Enterprise Teller System

S1 Teller provides a base set of transactions and core services necessary for fulfilling the rigorous requirements of today’s teller environment, including host communications, sharing and storing of information, cumulative totals, electronic journal, transaction security and approval, and balancing aids.

UX Design Research and Key Insights

Under my leadership of UX at S1, Enterprise Teller received the benefit of extensive ethnographic study of bank branch culture, including many depth interviews of Tellers and bank branch management. A number of banks, in different regions of the U.S. participated in these studies. Enterprise Teller also went through numerous iterations of prototyping, usability testing and design.

The "Master" Insight: The work of a teller requires effective interaction in a work environment that differs significantly from the work performed by users of consumer-oriented financial systems (e.g., web-based Personal Banking).  Some of the key aspects of Teller's unique needs are:

• "Mouseless" and keypad-oriented interaction: Optimized for "mouseless" operation (keyboard-only operation has been shown over time to be optimal for use by tellers in a busy branch environment)
• "Heads-up" operation: Tellers can easily operate without having to look at a screen
• Discrete task-specific screens: Each screen gives Tellers all the information they need for a specific task...densely populated screens are essential rather than a detriment in the world of Teller.
• The system MUST work transparently when off-line: This means that when communication with host computers is "down", the system must continue to work as if nothing is wrong...Tellers cannot tell customers that "the computers are down."
• Efficiency is a critical factor for teller systems: Efficiency is used here both in terms of transaction speed (the time it takes for a teller to get the results of an action he or she takes) and extreme ease of learning (e.g., 'walk up and use' ), which will ensure the shortest end user training effort as possible.
• Consistency with current work practices, such as...
  • Entry of numeric amounts should be "like a calculator" rather than like a web-based application.
  • Compatibility with existing special purpose output devices, such as check printers, etc.
  • No special input devices (e.g., special keyboards)
  • No additional special hardware, such as higher-end computers.

The only part of Enterprise Teller that I can show is the screen shot shown here, as there is no demo available for public viewing (a policy decision of S1).

Click on the image for a larger view.

Customization of Personal Online Banking: Regions Bank

S1 Personal Banking provides self-service capability to customers of banks for basic functionality such as account balance lookup and online bill payment.

The general "look and feel" of S1 Personal Banking can be seen in the standard Balances screen shot shown below:

Click on the image for a larger view.

The names of commands, navigation structure, layout and so forth were refined through many iterations of observation, depth interviews, terminology/categorization studies and usability evaluation (ranging from Expert Reviews to full lab-based Usability Testing with large numbers of participants).

This extensive UX work notwithstanding, many banks want S1's Personal Banking system to be branded according to their own internal standards. For this reason, the ability to customize was built into the technical architecture of most S1 products, including Personal Banking.

One of the first banks to apply a radically different appearance to S1's Personal Banking system was Regions Bank. Their re-design was so good that it was adopted as an example in the official S1 Design Pattern for Navigation. An early version of this customization is shown in the screen shots below:

Click either  image for a larger view.

          

Regions Bank has gone through a total corporate re-branding and they have refreshed their version of S1 Personal Banking accordingly. To get an idea of the current state of Regions Personal Banking, click here.

 

State Farm Bank

State Farm is a major S1 customer that, in addition to its insurance business, owns a bank called, not surprisingly, State Farm Bank. Over a period of more than 7 years, my team, colleagues and I collaborated on countless UX research and design activities, in most parts of the product design process,working with numerous State Farm in-house teams. 

These included:

• Software Development
• Usability Engineering
• Human Factors & Ergonomics (yes, a different group from Usability Engineering)
• Market Research
• Product Management
• UI Design

The highlights of our collaborative work with State Farm Bank included:

• Card-sort/naming/navigation studies (including the complex statistical analysis) involving well over 100 participants
• No fewer than 15 formal usability tests, in usability labs as well as "in the field"
• About 50 depth interviews
• Constant ethnographic observation of the State Farm corporate culture...50,000 people work in a single complex
• Several ethnographic studies of users
• Significant participation in the creation of UX patterns, standards and guidelines specific to State Farm Bank
• Visual Design
• Information Architecture
• Close collaboration with the teams that worked on State Farm's online insurance web sites, such as the Online Auto Insurance Rate Quote system.

To get to the web page from which you can link to a demo of State Farm Bank, click here.

My key team members and I spent a lot of time in Bloomington, IL, in the winter as well as the warmer months. I have proven that I can function in sub-zero temperatures :-)

S1

During my 7+ year tenure at S1 Corporation (provider of technology solutions for the financial industry), starting out as Manager of an 8-person User Interface Design & Usability Group, and culminating as Global Director of Customer Insights, UX and UI Design Standards, I had the chance to perform many duties, hands-on as well as managerial.

A summary of my work is as follows:

• Responsible for the TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE for a wide range of financial technology products and Official “Evangelist” for company-wide User-Centered Design, including company-wide User Interaction Standards (i.e. Style Guides)
• Organized collaboration of diverse UI design & development teams in locations around the world (Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Boston, Ireland, U.K. and India)
• Oversight of Use Case development by Business Analysts, Functional Requirements and Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs) by Product Managers
• Formalized Consumer Research, including ethnography and field interviewing, in the Product Development Process, VERY IMPORTANT in an Engineering-Centric Company like S1.
• Introduction and standardization of a number of new/better customer research methods, including online card-sorting, ethnographic methods, online testing, true quantitative (i.e. beyond pie charts) analysis of surveys.
• Introduced a User Experience Pattern-Based approach to product development. This became very effective way to distill years of usability testing, ethnography and other research (such as terminology, pricing studies, etc.) findings into a specific, actionable form that could drive design of a large and diverse product catalog.
• Established visual attractiveness and emotional appeal as quality criteria

It took many years, surviving countless reorganizations and organizational turmoil to eventually establish the power and influence to make all of the above happen. A lot of products that provided less than an excellent User Experience were produced by essentially renegade engineering groups along the way, but I am proud of several of the product lines that my team and I were able to affect, thanks largely to the Engineering Project Managers who "got it" and cooperated.

Probably my biggest accomplishment was getting User-Centered Design and UX oversight incorporated into S1's official product development process, a version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), which was formalized pretty late in the game.

Walmart.com

When I was engaged as a "Consulting Cognitive Engineer" by NCR, an important client, Walmart, which was just considering getting serious about its online store, challenged NCR to do a study of the existing version of Walmart.com and then WOW them with at least one actionable insight, with two VERY important caveats attached.

1. Our insight had to be believable (we had to offer support that it was a "true" insight)
2. Walmart had not thought of it already (they promised to be honest)

Given my expertise in doing the kinds of research that elicit hidden insights, such as ethnography and depth interviewing, I was brought onto the project and given the task to WOW Walmart management, who are not easily impressed with anything, as far as I could tell.

I set up a study that combined on-site (in peoples' homes and/or offices) usability testing with pretty much by-the-book Contextual Inquiry, as laid by Dr. Karen Holzblatt in her book of the same title. I had recently attended a post-Doctoral seminar with Dr. Holzblatt and knew the method well (pretty much what we call 'Ethnography Lite' these days).

To make a long story short, we met with a "cast of thousands" at Walmart, on their turf in Bentonville, AK, armed with 50 or so really serious problems with the existing Walmart.com. In my presentation, I was stopped at about the 20th actionable insight. Initially thinking that I had said something that offended someone (the cut-off was very sudden), what had actually happened was that I had already revealed 4 or 5 issues that had not even appeared as blips on Walmart's in-house research group's, product development's or management's "radar screens". The Director of Development declared that no consultant had ever come up with such useful information before and certainly not a Ph.D. type (a pretty close paraphrase of his comment). I took it as a compliment.

Result: NCR got all sorts of add-on work (things I am sure that I am not even aware of), riding the cloud of "cred" that I had helped to build. It did not hurt in developing my own internal credibility withing NCR either. One of the more satisfying moments of my professional life!

Take a look at Walmart.com as it exists today. Of course it has evolved substantially since my involvement.