Financial mentoring tool
Supporting financial mentors as they help New Zealanders navigate financial hardship.
Deliverables
UX research
UI redesign
Co-design facilitation
Usability testing
Year
2024
This project phase looked at the enhancement of a digital fintech tool for New Zealand's financial mentors helping clients navigate financial hardship. Our goal was to give mentors a more holistic view of their clients' financial situations to offer more tailored support. We also aimed to enhance service managers' oversight capabilities, allowing them better visibility of their service to better support their financial mentors.
The redesigned client view saw the introduction of a side navigation to surface metrics that were previously hidden deep in the IA. This strengthens the mental model of the Client, Case, and Session levels that information is structured within. New progress pills provide statuses at a glance of where action may be required from mentors for best-practise record keeping.
The more intuitive the user experience, the more capacity mentors and managers have to dedicate towards the impactful financial advocacy work they do, ultimately leading to better outcomes for clients.
A user survey revealed that financial mentors faced difficulties navigating the existing platform due to buried tools, fragmented workflows, and less accessible insights, leading to frustration and inefficiencies in their record keeping.
Prior to the development phase, a key feature 'Advocacy actions' had only a 2.5% completion rate across all financial services, with mentors describing it as "easy to miss if you don’t know about it, but even hard to locate when you do." Additionally, there was no quick way to access case-level features outside of a full mentoring session, hindering mentors' ability to track client progress at a glance.
The ‘debt retired estimation’ feature assists mentors with calculating the total debt paid off or retired over the course of a client case.
One mentor from the co-design group expressed how valuable this was in closing a case that had been ongoing for 8 years with thousands of dollars worth of retired debt to calculate.
By working directly with our stakeholders and a group of users throughout the phase through the co-design process, we were able to understand and strengthen technical mental models to reflect mentoring best practices in the tool.
Following on from enhancing the visibility of client metrics for mentors, we wanted to surface the same information for service managers.
The manager dashboard serves as a preview of the tool’s statistical reporting mechanism, enabling managers to generate reports for their organisations, governance, funders, etc. This feature is crucial for demonstrating the impact of their work; the better the records, the more valuable the insights become.