Work

Brief

One of the largest UK government departments was working on a transaction decision-support platform that could process vast sets of data and automatically flag fraudulent transactions based on a complex risk scoring system.

The problem was that this very complex system was very difficult to understand or control effectively. Operational managers needed fine-grained controls, the ability to drill down individual transactions, as well as a high level understanding of what was going on.

With this being an experimental platform, they also needed to clearly demonstrate how the platform worked and what it's benefits were to secure further funding.

I was in charge of designing and delivering an intuitive user interface that would solve all these user needs.

Details

As no one on the project could explain in simple terms what the platform did, my first task was to get a clear and simple definition of the product and its benefits over their current process. We did this through several workshops in which I got senior team members to explain how it worked using high-level sketches. I was able to map out how an end user's work would be improved by using this platform.

This allowed me to understand what the key benefits were and what needed to be communicated to the end user. Just as important, it allowed me to understand what complexity could be removed or de-prioritized.

With very tight deadlines to be met, I decided to adopt an iterative approach to the deliverables, quickly mocking up versions of the journeys and wireframes to get feedback. I would only add detail and document interactions once the most important aspects had been decided.

Deliverables

My key deliverables were:

• Prioritised user goals and tasks for demonstration
• User journeys for all main user tasks
• Wireframes with interaction design annotations to be prototyped

I also oversaw the development on an interactive prototype to ensure the key value of the product was correctly conveyed.

Outcomes

The interface demonstrated the significant benefits of this platform. The client noted that the visually attractive front-end made it very easy to see what was going on in the processing layer, which led them to commission further work to produce a production-ready solution.