Reimagining The UX Of A Customer Portal

2014 was a year of significant progress for Bajaj Finserv. Bajaj Finserv is a Non Banking Financial Company (NBFC) in India, that deals in loans and other financial products. The company was moving towards building a stronger digital brand than ever. With it, I wanted to reimagine Experia, our customer portal, to make it a stronger asset. I went about it with a two fold purpose -

1. To serve customers with everything that a customer portal is supposed to do, in the quickest possible way without compromising on their ability to comprehend
2. Build a platform that connects with the company’s intelligence engine, to up-sell/cross-sell other products and become a significant contributor to the company’s bottomline

The views presented in this case study are my own and does not necessarily reflect that of Bajaj Finserv. To comply with the company’s non disclosure agreement, I’ve omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study.

MY ROLE

My role was to imagine new capabilities and design new flows to improve the user experience and to address different business pain points in the company owned asset.

CUSTOMER INSIGHTS & IDEATION

I partnered with members of the data analytics team and the customer experience team to understand the various levels of intelligence and customer feedback, and how to use these data points to cross-sell promotions at the right time to the right person.

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY

In the initial stages, I created a couple of frameworks and models that helped define the insights and translate concepts into features. I evangelised customer goals and at the same time tried to balance business goals. This helped me prioritise the features required for the first cut, and gain alignment with multiple stakeholders within the company.

CHALLENGE 1: Make The Customer’s Time On The Portal Easy

Although the portal was robust and contained a lot of information about any particular account, we realised customers were dropping out frequently from the site without browsing around. Further investigation via a survey by the Customer Experience team revealed the following three main concerns -

1. Too much clutter. Too many numbers. Difficult to understand at first glance
2. There is an information overdose
3. Too many unnecessary clicks to get to where they want to go.

CHALLENGE 2: Create Deeper Relationships With The Customers And Push The Right Content At The Right Time

The Data Analytics team had worked on a model that could predict which customer is most likely to choose which product at what stage of his life and at which stage of his account lifecycle. This was gold!

Except that the way these highly customised promotions were being served, was a dud. They were not optimised in terms of typography, image selection and placements — which also restricted showing multiple related promotions. More often than not, they fell into blind spots and any effort to divert attention to these promotions would result in an intrusive popup.

How do we serve these promotions without being too in your face or being hidden in some obscure corner of the portal?

THE APPROACH

To approach the first challenge, I took the following key points into consideration -

1. Explore a visual way of showing what’s most important to the customer
2. Empower the customer to make decisions on how they want to use the portal. Nothing in your face.
3. Add value to every visit and not just display information

Some early explorations of data visualisation

I wanted to explore different ways and methods to represent data visually and to convey critical information at just a glance. Early explorations included use of bar graphs and progress bars.

V 1.0 of the portal dashboard

I worked on an initial design, but soon realised there were some glaring issues -

1. There’s still a lot of clutter
2. Content sections are not divided intuitively. Therefore, flow of information gets interrupted and breaks the experience
3. Multi-category relationships could not be accommodated with this framework
4. With the above design, about 60% of the real estate was covered with promotions and other content with little to no visual hierarchy
5. As a result of unstructured information flow, we felt a lot of things were all over the place

I redefined my approach to make things even simpler. Explore one view for all loans/products and most importantly, filter the 3 most critical pieces of information for the customer and present them in an easy to comprehend manner.

After a few iterations, I locked in on cards

Cards contain the most critical information for the customer with optional CTAs if required

This was great because, now I could display the most important information, within a dedicated container, thereby bringing structure and flow. Also, more visual, less data. Colours and typography would refine the visual hierarchy even further.

The sketch below represents the dashboard in its entirety with the stacked cards.

A lo-fi sketch of the dashboard at first glance

My intention with this design was to show that there are two clear divisions in the dashboard. The left side (the first thing that the human eye sees when reading), shows the stacked cards of information, instinctively relaying to the user — “All the information about my accounts show up here”. This addresses the point of too much clutter and too many numbers. It’s concise and you get all the important details the moment you log in. If you need more details about a particular card, you can simply click on it to reveal more information (shown in the sketch below).

The right side with lots of white space, draws attention by visually grouping the content into a bucket, without it being too loud and screaming for attention.

The stakeholders loved the card design. However, the subdued promotional space and the whitespace surrounding it was one of the most controversial design decisions for me. I spent more time defending it than I had originally thought. I believe that visual relief can be successfully used to direct attention to an object, rather than use loud and in-your-face techniques, which tend to fatigue a user’s experience.

After a few discussions with the business team, it got clear to me that their primary concern was to get as much screen space possible for the promotional ads. To address this, I started my design process by working from the point of view of the user and their thoughts, feelings and actions. After evaluating my iterations, I zeroed in on the decision to keep the promotional space subdued as originally intended, but keeping them visible in a static ever-present column on the right (shown in the sketch below).

A explanation of the flow:

1. The user clicks on a card
2. The panel numbered (2) slides open with more information about that particular relationship.
3. All the information about a particular card is grouped into multiple sub-menu items.
4. When any sub-menu item is clicked, the relevant information inside is presented into small info blocks that get displayed only when needed.
5. Favouring business goals, I wanted the promotional content to slide out and reduce in size to give more prominence to panel (2) while still being present in the field of view if required.

ADDING VALUE BEFORE AND AFTER LOGGING IN

Now on to the next challenge — how do I create deeper relationships with my customers? How do I add value to every visit and transition from transaction driven to value driven?

Bajaj Finserv already owned two content portals — Frames Life and Go For Great. Both were a collection of rich stories curated by a team. It’d be a great idea to seed such quality content from these two portals (and other sources) into Experia. And to do this without interrupting their flow, I started looking at two often overlooked screens — the login and the logout screen.

The two screens are just different sides of a gate. As the user spends the least amount of time at the gates, I had to make sure my content was short and easily digestible.

I narrowed down my micro content options to these three -

1. Last week in numbers
2. Trending conversations on the internet
3. Most viral/popular video from last week

There was an additional thought about future monetising possibilities using the new login and logout framework, but since it wasn’t a point of focus at the time, I let it be.

REFLECTIONS

This was one of my last major projects at Bajaj Finserv and unfortunately I moved into a new city before the revised version could be launched. However, this still remains one of the most life transforming experiences I’ve ever had. It was my first big solo project involving multiple stakeholders, and my first experience trying to align different team members from different disciplines into the relatively unfamiliar territory of design.