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

There are host of accounting softwares available online, but none of them offer their users the ability to connect with professionals that can guide them through the turbulence of starting a new business. We wanted to create a network where users could get connected to these professionals to help with financial knowledge and loan assistance. The real challenge for our design team was to connect with our stakeholders and understand what are the differences of our three key users (business coaching 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 hand offs in Figma that helped developers and stakeholders understand all the complexities of each role and file organization 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 roll type. In calls joined by them and their clients we were able to troubleshoot and course correct. Some important discoveries we made along the way were that:

-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 a link to give them 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 some of the mock ups we presented were in finished for design team inspiration.

Exploration

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 product is quickly scaling up

Project Phase

This project is currently going live. That said, we are in the process of adding our community partners of 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 gain insights into customer needs and