Overview

FINSYNC is a financial accounting software for small businesses (see FINSYNC Case Study for more details). The FINSYNC Impact Center is a place where these small businesses connect with a variety of professionals that can assist them in their business journey. These include angel investors, bankers, and business accelerator programs.

Challenge

When setting up a business, entrepreneurs are often challenged getting connected with the right professionals to guide them in their business journey. We wanted to create a network where entrepreneurs could get connected to these professionals to help with financial knowledge, business expertise and loan assistance. The real challenge for our design team was to connect with our stakeholders and understand what differences of our three key users (Program Administrators, bankers, and Angel Investors) and organize three different versions of the product for each role type. 

The Approach (Key Business Goals)

-Ensure designs and functionality fit closely with the designs in our Main Platform
-Understand the needs of each user role and what they are looking for in the product
-Make highly detailed handoffs in Figma that help developers and stakeholders understand all the complexities of each role and file organization for developers that enabled roles to be clearly differentiated

User Testing

Throughout the process we iterated our prototypes with teammates in our company who worked on the side of each role type. In calls joined by stakeholders and their clients we were able to troubleshoot and course correct. Some important discoveries we made along the way were:

-Investors had an appetite to invest in smaller amounts than we had anticipated
-Community Organizations wanted to use their own courses and not the internal offerings our team was creating
-Bankers didn’t want to manually add clients, and just wanted to give them a link to do it themselves

These wireframe presentations were critical in helping us avert a lot of assumptive paths that would have been very costly for the organization. Note: Since we were building a new product, my design director challenged me to come up with designs in high-fidelity to experiment with new UI that would incorporate light and dark mode and work it into our new design system so these mock ups were ultimately presented in high-fidelity for design team inspiration.

Project Phase

We experimented with many different concepts for making designs that would ensure the greatest level of impact. These were carefully scaled down as we got feedback from stakeholders as to the limitations of our engineering team and MVP.

This project is currently going live. That said, we are in the process of adding partner banks as well as business accelerators to the product to grow network adoption. In this stage we are collecting feedback from our new users and using it to gain insights into customer needs and next steps for the product. These will lead to new discoveries, improvements and strategy as we scale the product.