Putting the customer first

A case study illustrating the importance of balancing business goals with user needs

Background

One particular long form application that our team built related to a business current account application. Within the application, customers were asked to provide details of the business they were involved in. The primary goal for the business unit was to be able to categorise the customers’ main business activity into appropriate higher level categories.

For example, if I was, say, a butcher, then from the business perspective, that would mean that I fall under the following high level categories:

  • Retail trade
    • Food / beverage / tobacco (specialized)
      • Butcher

The business goal was to capture all three of these business related categories to allow appropriate processing in the back offices.

The problem: a solution heavily focussed on a business goal

The problem occurred when the business unit chose to pass the responsibility of this categorisation on to customers. What was briefed in was for the customer to choose their business activity exactly as the above list illustrates:

  • A customer began by specifying the highest level category their business fits into
  • Based on their previous selection, they then had to choose the next high level sub category from a list of predefined options
  • Finally, based on their previous selection, they would choose their actual business from a list of predefined options

If at any point a customer chose incorrectly for the first two categories, they wouldn’t be able to find their business activity.

The original implementation caused unnecessary cognitive load for customers and created an unmaintainable position for the publishing team.

The solution was 100% business-centric, placed a huge cognitive load on customers and made what should have been a simple question for a customer to answer, into an unnatural way for a customer to think about what they do.

In reality, from a logic and build perspective, several complications arose:

  • The approach consisted of a whopping 265 conditional drop down fields:
    • 1 drop down for Business Activity 1
    • 58 conditional drop downs for Business Activity 2
    • 206 conditional drop downs for Business category 3
  • It caused major issues presenting the customers’ chosen business activities on a review screen, requiring 14 different summary components to cover the appearance of Activity 1, 2 and 3 in the review screen.
  • The solution was extremely hard to maintain from a publishing perspective, the number of fields required had introduced a huge performance issue with the administration of the form.

It made for quite an unintuitive UX for customers – the majority of customer naturally identified most with the 3rd business category, but were being asked to categorise their business by specifying high level categories first.

Improved solution

Leveraging the power we had with database tables, I developed a table in Excel that represented each business activity and its relationship to the higher level categories. I then planned out an improvement to our existing data tables drop down field (a field that directly referenced this table to populate options) to include the ability to group options together into different categories.

I put forward an improved solution that used a single dropdown for customers to choose from. The solution comprised of:

  • One searchable dropdown that referenced the table I developed, which a customer would use to choose their main business activity. 
  • One summary component that covered all 3 business activities
  • Created a much more intuitive UX for a customer – they can search directly for Activity 3, and with one selection, all 3 business activities are set.
  • Maintenance was greatly improved from a performance and logic perspective,

And the business were still provided with the information they need for each category.

Improved solution created a more intuitive experience for customers, while still providing the business with the information they needed in the background.

Conclusion

This case study illustrates the importance of balancing user needs together with business goals. It also highlights a problem with accepting an initial solution put forward by a business unit and the value of questioning why. It is so important to challenge business propositions and put yourself in the shoes of your user base.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this case study as much as I enjoyed finding a suitable solution!