Web portal to view and manage transactions
B2B Web design, FinTech
The merchant services web portal has 16,000+ users from organizations across all of Blackbaud's products and verticals, meaning the portal's users vary widely and the organizations they work for vary widely. Most portal users have different needs from one another and use the portal for different reasons.
A gift processor, for example, would likely use the portal to look up a transaction for a donor to their nonprofit, while a CPA would likely use the portal to pull a disbursement report in order to reconcile the bank account at month end.
Users by role:
Not comprehensive
Prior to my involvement with this project, functionality in the existing portal was evaluated to determine if it should be included in the port to the upgraded portal. Most functionality was ported, but 2 pieces of functionality were not, the Daily Transactions Report and Suspect Transaction Management.
The Daily Transactions Report, was a static report that could not be changed to meet individual organization and user requirements. It was replaced by a new feature called the Transactions List page. The Transactions List page was designed to allow for more customizable and flexible reporting in order to meet varying organization and user reporting requirements.
Suspect Transaction Management was not ported to the upgraded portal because over the years its functionality decreased substantially and there was no clear indication that users valued or needed the functionality. There was no functionality to replace Suspect Transaction Management in the upgraded portal.
Customers participating in the Early Adopter program found that the upgraded portal met their needs and obtaining feedback from them was quick and easy as they had weekly meetings with our Product Manager. During the Limited Availability period, however, we determined we needed a way to collect feedback from a larger audience, so I worked with our User Research team and Product Manager to design a Happiness survey and released it in-product.
The Happiness survey was a condensed version of a survey that the UX Research team sends out yearly, called the HUX survey (Happiness and User Experience). We asked some of the same questions in the Happiness survey as the HUX survey in order to compare metrics from the 2021 HUX and the upcoming 2022 HUX.
The Happiness survey results were significantly lower across measured benchmark scores compared to the 2021 HUX survey.
The shut off of the existing portal was delayed to give us, the product team, time to address these low scores.
We needed to uncover the problems users were having with the upgraded portal that led to such low scores and figure out how to address them.
We implemented a plan of action where we would simultaneously address quick wins gathered from survey responses and conduct more in-depth user interviews to learn more about user's pain points.
Using survey results we put together a list of features that would be fast for our engineers to implement (low effort) and would have a big impact on the user experience (high impact). The quick wins were released in April 2022, 1 month after the upgraded portal release.
Quick wins:
I facilitated 10 user interviews with survey respondents that opted in to speaking with us further.
Each interview only covered topics the participant mentioned in their specific survey response as that is all they had consented to speak with us about.
The team's product manager assisted with facilitation/note taking and the team's engineers observed to gain further empathy for the users.
I synthesized interview insights into an affinity diagram to further analyze user pain points and workflows.
Using information from the user interviews and open ended survey responses I better defined common workflows and identified use cases that were previously not well understood or documented.
I wrote 3 different problem statements based on different use cases identified during discovery.
General Reconciliation:
As a portal user who deals with reconciliation workflows I want faster, more custom, and more trustworthy reporting that we use in different formats to speed up our reconciliation processes because we are small, multi-tasking, and generally doing other things. BBMS is only one part of our process.
Reconciliation to another Blackbaud product:
As a portal user who primarily deals with gift reconciliation, I need a quick and reliable way to search for transactions by criteria that is specific to my organization and our reconciliation process. This information acts as our source of truth when reconciling gifts with other products and could be shared, so needs to be easily digestible by different departments.
Bank Reconciliation:
As a portal user who primarily deals with bank reconciliation, I need a way to view all the transaction information I need in order to reconcile the bank account. I need to be able to reconcile quickly and efficiently.
I further distilled the problem statements into areas where we could have the most impact if we addressed user's pain points.
Reporting & Reconciliation
Transactions:
The root cause of dissatisfaction with the upgraded portal was a lack of feature parity with the classic portal and no new functionality that adequately replicated the classic functionality.
Decision: Rebuild the Daily Transactions Report
Functionality that was not ported to the upgraded portal due to seemingly low usage. Additionally, the new transactions list page in the upgraded portal was supposed to provide more flexible reporting than this static transaction report. Survey results and user interviews, however, indicated that Daily Transactions Report was integral to user's workflows. Discovery also showed that the transactions list page had usability issues to the point that users were not adopting the upgraded portal. They continued to use the classic portal in order to access this report, indicating a lack of feature parity and inadequate replacement functionality. Low adoption was a problem because the classic portal would soon be completely shut down. Ultimately, to meet our user's short term needs we decided to rebuild the Daily Transactions Report. While rebuilding the functionality we continued discovery and ideation to determine how to make transactions list page more valuable to users.
For additional context, see Daily Transactions Report spotlight.
Decision: Rebuild Suspect Transaction Management
Suspect Transaction Management was not ported to the upgraded portal because over the years its functionality decreased substantially and there was no clear indication that users valued or needed the functionality. Previously, if transactions were flagged as "Suspect" funds would not be disbursed, but over the years that changed and Blackbaud no longer held the funds. This meant the "Suspect" flag acted as more of a notification. Survey results, clearly indicated that users did find value in the notification despite the lack of enforcement, so we made the decision to rebuild this functionality as well.
We wanted to ensure users had time to adapt to the changes we made to the portal prior to the distribution of the 2022 HUX survey.
Changes made prior to the 2022 HUX Survey:
We compared the results of the 2022 HUX survey to the results of the Happiness survey in order to measure the impact of the changes we made to the portal.
The scores we measured dramatically increased, back to almost where they were prior to the upgraded portal release.
These results are a testament to the impact that UX Research and Design can have on a product and make it very clear that all of the work I did for this project made a huge, measurable impact.
During the period between the release of the portal enhancements and the results of the HUX survey, we still worked to identify the most valuable problems we could solve. The goal was to release these changes prior to the 2022 HUX survey, but due to technical limitations it was not possible.
We focused on the transactions list page and addressed 2 pain points:
To learn more about this process see Daily Transactions Report spotlight.
This was a large project to take on and was the first project I worked on at Blackbaud. I worked very closely with my Product Manager and together we were able figure out how to give our users the most valuable product we could.
The results of this work clearly show the benefits that User Research, UX and PM working together, and long term measurement can have.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
