Making complex interactions easy

Find out about their current financial situation, as well as their hopes and dreams for the future.

Create a realistic plan for the family, using the app.

3. Meet with prospects again

In this meeting, the advisor presents the plan. Ideally they close the sale and convert the prospects into customers at this meeting.  

This interaction was part of an app used by financial advisors. This is their workflow:

This page is prepopulated with information we already have. In the vast majority of cases, advisors won't need to make any edits. They can just hit Continue and be on their way. 

When the advisor comes to the page, it presents the information needed to calculate and optimize a married couple's taxes. In this case, all three drop downs affect each other, as well as the tax rate table below. 

The pen icon was used throughout the app to initiate edits. End users showed a strong preference for inline edits, even when it made the page much more complex.

This was the first time we tried to apply more consumer-style design approaches to enterprise software at scale. Here are some learnings from the experience.

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE CONSUMERIFICATION

• Design your app to be visually attractive.
• Write in simple, informal language.
• Make the app easy to learn for end users.
• Test with end users at different career stages and performance levels.

• Assume that end users have perfect recall of everything in their field.
• Test your app with stakeholders instead of end users.
• Remove functionality just because lay people don't understand it.