Supporting Small Business Growth and Financial Health with a Small Business Check-in tool.
The Small Business Check-in is a self-service web and mobile tool that helps small business clients quickly assess where they currently stand financially, evaluate their goals, and discover how their banking partner can help open new opportunities toward their path forward. As the Senior Design Lead, I played a pivotal role in creating the overall strategy, obtaining leadership buy-in, designing the experience, and leading junior designers.
OVERVIEWThe Objective
Small businesses continue to face the considerable challenges of the pandemic, inflation, a labor shortage and an ever-changing economy. To succeed, having the proper resources, tools and advice at their disposal is a necessity.
Today KeyBank offers an in-branch Small Business Review experience that was designed to gather extensive information from small business clients to provide personalized recommendations. Not only does this experience take time to complete but it’s also only available in person.
The team was challenged by the head of small business banking to figure out how to best help our small business clients succeed by quickly identifying business priorities, goals and needs before even coming into the branch.
The initial target audience was the Head of Small Business Banking and the Director of Business Development and Execution, focusing on pitching the right experience and securing funding for the build and implementation of the solution. After stakeholder buy-in, the focus shifted on continuing to design, build and implement the small business check-in experience.
The Results
Securing $500K in funding for the build and development of the new experience.
An easy-to-build experience for developers leveraging components from our existing design system allowing us to develop and ship the experience with minimal resources and in a short amount of time.
A consistent and complimentary user experience with our Consumer Financial Wellness review to allow for future integrations.
Increased number of Small Business review appointments scheduled in branches leading to more successful small business relationships.
My Role
I was the Senior Design Lead on this project. My responsibilities and design activities included:
Establishing the design strategy and project plan
Reporting progress weekly to the executive stakeholders
Planning and facilitating all design thinking workshops
Leading junior designers
Building low and high-fidelity prototypes
Planning and facilitating testing
THE PROCESSAn iterative, human-centered approach to problem-solving
Phase 1: Discover
KICK-OFF WORKSHOP
Understanding the business perspective & aligning with stakeholders
The first step in this project was to plan and facilitate a kick-off workshop with our executive stakeholders to align and agree on the project's goals and identify innovation opportunities based on the current client pain points and needs.
Activities such as writing down hopes and fears, gathering existing knowledge, brainstorming on what could lead the project to fail, and ideating on how might we’s, helped the team better understand the business perspective.
The 2nd part of the workshop was focused on identifying opportunities. To do this, we went through a current state journey mapping exercise using a proto-persona that was created before the workshop in partnership with small business bankers.
RESEARCH
Talking to users & identifying opportunities
We spent the next couple of weeks focused on further understanding our users and identifying key insights to inform our ideation phase. This included:
Banker focus groups with 40 bankers
10 in-depth interviews with bankers
A survey with 100 small business owners
Phase 2: Analyze
INSIGHTS
Some of the key insights identified through our research included:
Insight # 1
Client trust is crucial to interaction.
Bankers agreed that knowing some basics about their client’s businesses will help them feel more confident and build stronger relationships with clients ultimately leading to more productive and fruitful interactions.
Insight # 2
A human element is critical to success.
Small business clients agreed that dealing with their finances is complex and is not something they want to do on their own. This insight helped reinforce that the small business check-in would be helpful as a complementary tool but shouldn’t replace an interaction with a banker.
Insight #3
Getting to know a client takes time.
Bankers need to spend a considerable amount of time during their first appointment getting to know their clients which can sometimes discourage clients from meeting with a banker. This led us to explore ways to collect important information upfront without seeming too intrusive.
PERSONAS
Leveraging the findings from the Discover phase, we also created 3 additional small business client proto-personas to be leveraged in the ideation and testing phases:
Phase 3: Ideate
IDEATION WORKSHOP
Exploring solutions to the pain points identified
Using the insights identified in the Discover and Analyze phases, I planned and co-facilitated an ideation workshop to start exploring solutions to the pain points identified. Key stakeholders, small business clients and bankers, and other members of the product team including Devs, BAs, and QAs participated in this workshop to ensure that were getting all perspectives up-front and ultimately creating a viable, feasible, and desirable experience.
Using a 6-1 ideation activity, the team came up with 15+ ideas to explore. The team then voted on the top ideas. The top three voted ideas included:
Phase 4: Prototype
LOW-FIDELITY
Rapidly testing potential solutions
I started by creating low-fidelity wireframes of these 3 initial concepts and testing them with small business bankers and small business clients. Based on initial feedback from our users and our stakeholders the team started to focus on the short pre-appointment questionnaire concept and started working towards a higher fidelity concept.
HIGH-FIDELITY
Focusing on a more concrete solution
I worked closely with small business bankers and our stakeholders to start to determine the flow of the experience and which questions to prioritize. Once we had a working prototype, we were ready for testing.
Phase 5: Test
Our testing included recruiting 8 users that fit our initial proto-personas as well as working with small business bankers to have them reach out to some of their existing clients and have the, go through the experience. The feedback was overall positive. Some of the top learnings included:
Questionnaire Flow and Copy
Clients and bankers helped us identify questions to modify or cut out and tweaks to make to some of the copy to improve the overall flow and experience. For example, not seeing a category that best describes their business discouraged certain clients from continuing. Adding a free-form text box under the ‘other’ category helped make the experience feel more relevant and personalized to all.
Quick Insights
Understanding how others are doing and providing users with quick insights was very important to our users. This helped motivate clients to keep going through the experience and ultimately complete the questionnaire.
Insight Summary
Clients wanted to be able to get immediate value from completing the Small Business Check-in and before scheduling an appointment with a banker. However, they didn’t feel ready to act on any recommendations before meeting with a banker. This helped us evolve our ‘how we can help’ screen from recommendations to valuable insights with the main call-to-action being to schedule an appointment with a banker.
THE IMPACTSecuring $500K in funding for the build and development of the new experience.
An easy-to-build experience for developers leveraging components from our existing design system allowing us to develop and ship the experience with minimal resources and in a short amount of time.
A consistent and complimentary user experience with our Consumer Financial Wellness review to allow for future integrations.
Increased number of Small Business review appointments scheduled in branches leading to more successful small business relationships.