Carolyn Clements - Product Designer

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Carolyn Clements
Product Designer

Carolyn Clements - Product Designer

Contact

Prestige Financial’s revenue stream was held hostage.

Customers sought their product, but their laborious account-servicing system restricted their portfolio to 65k accounts.

Legacy software systems compelled their collections representatives to navigate a daunting array of decisions, causing mental exhaustion and a limit to the number of accounts they could serve.

To free the company's revenue stream from its efficiency dam and reduce hiring needs, Prestige enlisted a team of skilled bounty hunters - commonly known as product designers.

How would this motley crew change the course of the company?

Prestige Financial’s revenue stream was held hostage.

Customers sought their product, but their laborious account-servicing system restricted their portfolio to 65k accounts.

Legacy software systems compelled their collections representatives to navigate a daunting array of decisions, causing mental exhaustion and a limit to the number of accounts they could serve.

To free the company's revenue stream from its efficiency dam and reduce hiring needs, Prestige enlisted a team of skilled bounty hunters - commonly known as product designers.

How would this motley crew change the course of the company?

What

Internal software application

Why

0 to 1 product design

Restructure collections workflow

Replace legacy software

Expand revenue potential

When

May 2023 - Present

Company

Prestige Financial Services

Team

Carolyn Clements, Product Designer

Stephanie Bird, Senior Product Designer

Mikaela Madsen, Product Designer

Zander Indo, UX/UI Manager

Where

Draper, Utah, United States

Phase I: Discovery

We explored the strange world our collections employees inhabited.

Phase I: Discovery

We explored the strange world our collections employees inhabited.

User Research

We knew that insufficient facts would invite danger, so we hedged our bets with user research before we began ideating on solutions.

As team, we used interviews, contextual inquiries, and a department survey to capture data.

I helped refine our questions and synthesized the resulting data into problem statements and informed user personas.

We learned that collections employees were dealing with:
- 8+ separate apps
- A complex series of decisions
- Information overload (hundreds of pieces of data on the screen)
- No measures of progress and achievement

To differentiate between our distinct user groups, I helped refine our questions and used the resulting data to write problem statements and informed personas.

This was part of my team's toolkit for justifying our decisions to stakeholders.

Getting Stakeholder Approval

In my team’s presentation, I also displayed my vision for how the company’s applications could look with a new, brand-aligned design system in place.

Concept Preview

An existing app reimagined in light and dark mode, with accessible and on-brand palettes.

Phase II: Envisioning the Solution

How could we restructure the agents’ workflow to support a higher rate of account task completion per person?

Phase II: Envisioning the Solution

How could we restructure the agents’ workflow to support a higher rate of account task completion per person?

Wireframes & Design System

Engineering had decided that the new product would be built out using Radzen.Blazor components. This meant we had to develop the new design system with Blazor components as the base.

This caused some grumbling between design comrades, but we complied and made the best of this aesthetically-challenged asp.net framework.

Below is one of several user flows I used to ensure my wireframes met requirements.

I was responsible for delivering hi-fidelity mockups of key features for release one - the task queue and the task-closing functions.

First iterations

Exploring formats to display essential account details, task queues, user status, and progress within the container.

Designing a linear path

How could I lead users through their tasks while allowing for a variety of job functions and restricting visibility to a single customer account?

Planning for future releases

Even though the first release will have minimal features, everything that will eventually be included had to be accounted for.

Phase III: Launching a New Future

We boldly went where no one had gone before. With high-fidelity mocks in hand, we checked them against business requirements and handed them off for the first release.

Phase III: Launching a New Future

We boldly went where no one had gone before. With high-fidelity mocks in hand, we checked them against business requirements and handed them off for the first release.

We’ve got our designs, prototypes, and stakeholder approval. It’s time for engineering to make it so.

You can expect petty bickering from all sides, and it will be most intriguing.

Right now the back-and-forth iterations seem doomed to continue ad infinitum.

Stay tuned.