Client Voices

Supporting financial mentors as they help New Zealanders navigate financial hardship.

Deliverables

UX/UI design
UX research
Co-design facilitation
Usability testing

Year

2024

Someone working on a laptop showing the Client Voices dashboard, in a sunny office.

Client Voices is a digital fintech tool for New Zealand's financial mentors helping clients navigate financial hardship.

The goal of this project phase was to give mentors a more holistic view of 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 Client Voices style guide: Source Sans Pro type, button styles and colour pairings for text and backgrounds, including combinations to avoid.

A client session screen before and after the redesign, with a clearer budget worksheet.

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.

The advocacy actions checklist, with a callout: completion rose from 2.5% to 78% in the first six months.

A user survey revealed that financial mentors faced difficulties navigating the existing platform.

Buried tools, fragmented workflows, and less accessible insights, lead 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 close-case form, which calculates how much debt was retired, followed by a wellbeing reflection.

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.

Notes and sticky notes from the manager dashboard workshop, with a photo of the whiteboard.

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 Client Voices.

The manager dashboard, showing each mentor's case load, inactive open cases and case fill-out rates.

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.

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