Financial Services
Designing digital services to support people in managing their money.
Case study
Aligning product strategy with user-needs
How we helped Parmenion prioritise their product roadmap using insight drawn from discovery research.
What’s our next move?
Parmenion helps financial advisers invest their clients’ money in appropriate portfolios through their online investment platform and DFM service. The company has grown rapidly and is known for offering advisers excellent technology and a seamless user experience.
Parmenion’s team are committed to continuously improving their services and they’re keen to focus on what their clients actually need.
They had ideas for improving their mobile app and for introducing more streamlined processes. But what was most important to advisers? And what would help them to continue building their reputation for smart, user-centred solutions?
Parmenion also wanted to understand how to embed discovery activities into their technology development cycle, and were keen to build their skills and capabilities in this area.
Approach
What’s most important to your users?
We embedded ourselves in the UX and marketing team for three months.
Together we delivered a programme of research that incorporated existing data from the Client Services team who speak to advisers every day and web-app analytics, as well as new data from a series of depth interviews and observation sessions in advisers’ offices.
Panda’s careful and open approach to user research, with a clear set of goals and regular updates to stakeholders, has really helped us shape the discovery phase of our projects.
Ben Dunn – User Experience Lead
at Parmenion Capital Partners
We also interviewed industry experts, both inside and outside the business, to understand how the market was moving and what technical or legal constraints we needed to be aware of.
Outcomes
A new consensus
Data gathered from our research helped us create experience maps and storyboards describing the different processes that advisers go through with their clients. These included onboarding new clients, conducting investment reviews and handling ad hoc changes to portfolios.
We captured each persona’s goals and motivations, what works well for them now and what they find frustrating or difficult in each situation.
These insights helped the team to see more clearly where they should be focusing their efforts, and make some swift decisions about their roadmap for this year.
Members of Parmenion’s UX team took part in interviews and analysis and are now equipped to do their own user research. Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders across the business have seen the value in doing discovery work to generate and validate ideas before starting development.
I was relatively new to user-research, but working with Panda has given us the confidence to put discovery research at the heart of product development.
Ben Dunn – User Experience Lead
at Parmenion Capital Partners
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