XYZ Financial are new players in the highly competitive Fintech game.
They provide tax automation and validation solutions for financial institutions.

XYZ Financial needed their software to transform the cumbersome, time-consuming process of manually recording and validating client tax information.

My brief was to design software that acts just like an intelligent, educated accountant or lawyer. It goes through the forms, cross checking, coming out with a classification and then preparing a report for the tax authorities.

XYZ Financial also needed a design system that would safeguard the quality and consistency of future products.

The team

The previous solution had been designer by the Engineering team and this was the first time XYZ Financial had dedicated design resource.

Engineering

- VP of Engineering
- Solution Architect
- Full Stack Developer

Product

- Product Owner

Commercial

- The Founder
- Commercial Lead

Design

- UX/UI (Me)

Current process and proposed actions

The XYZ Financial team walked me through their current top level product process, allowing me to recommend some immediate actions and explore potential UX activities to tackle the company's biggest blind spots at the time.

Interviews

I interviewed a mix of XYZ stakeholders representing all levels within the company and end users of their current service. 

Themes and personas

Taking key themes from these interviews:

- Lack of accuracy
- Lack of efficiency
- Absence of paper trail

I created a number of different personas, to keep users at the heart of any design decision. Each persona listed details on the context, goals, behaviours, and frustrations typically characterising its user type.

Wireframing, prototyping, development

I presented the XYZ Financial team with a series of user flows, wireframes and interactive prototypes.
Ultimately, we chose a simple, clean design that:

• Stepped out the validation process without overwhelming users
• Enabled team members and manager to track their workload
• Supported scalability as the service grew and evolved

XYZ Financial needed a design system everyone understood and endorsed. I worked with XYZ Financial’s head of engineering, and the team responsible for the tax validation software (the product owner and head of marketing) to build it.

The benefits of this system include:

- Creating a common product language that promoted collaboration
- Protecting the integrity of XYZ’s product design standards
- Preventing misunderstandings about look and feel and functionality in future products

I used key principles of the Atomic Design system and Sass conventions including, “make it modular" and "think generic".

Here is a snapshot.

Results

This project achieved on every level:

• Functionally - following a beta launch, users reported an initial 5 minute decrease in time spent validating tax forms
• Financially – it helped secure a partnership with a multi-national tech giant
• Culturally - XYZ Financial’s staff recognised the benefits of the new software and design system, and proposed other creative approaches and practical solutions

XYZ Financial is a bright and ambitious Fintech startup that’s attracting a lot of attention. My aim was to deliver flexible, adaptive product and system designs to help them secure their position as leaders in the congested marketplace.