Overview
Fannie Mae’s design team partners internally with different business units to create one-of-a-kind digital products to help them serve their external customers. These internal business units typically do business with external companies related to Fannie Mae's line of work.
The design team was asked to create a tool to centralize data streams for these internal groups who do business specifically around our data: finance, digital mortgage, and beyond.
I was brought in to deliver on a very specific ask from our stakeholder: determine this forthcoming product’s narrative.
My role
• Content strategist
• Storyteller
I worked with a UX designer, a UX researcher, product devs, and a product owner to deliver this work.
• Storyteller
I worked with a UX designer, a UX researcher, product devs, and a product owner to deliver this work.
Tools I used
• Mural: to review user interview synthesis content and house my own research findings
• Powerpoint: to house my product narrative content
• Powerpoint: to house my product narrative content
The ask
My main stakeholder heads up a team that deals with Fannie Mae data and how our teams use it to do business externally.
One of the problems with data at Fannie Mae is that it flows from many disparate locations and there’s no central hub to compare notes. He worked with our design team to create the Operational Insights Hub, or OIH for short. This hub would connect all of the sources of data so folks could backtrack and verify data if they needed it.
With so many people tapping into Fannie Mae data, our stakeholder had a second challenge: how do I sell this product to the rest of the Enterprise after it goes live?
I was asked to create a high-level product narrative. This narrative would eventually guide my stakeholder’s discussions with other senior leaders ahead of the product’s launch.
My process
I took a few steps to come up with a product narrative for OIH:
1) Interview: I first interviewed our main stakeholder. I love doing interviews because it’s a direct line inside a user’s (or in this case, a stakeholder’s) brain. I conducted the interview to hear about the impetus for the product, what he hopes it will enable others to do, and how he feels it fits into the greater Fannie Mae product ecosystem.
1) Interview: I first interviewed our main stakeholder. I love doing interviews because it’s a direct line inside a user’s (or in this case, a stakeholder’s) brain. I conducted the interview to hear about the impetus for the product, what he hopes it will enable others to do, and how he feels it fits into the greater Fannie Mae product ecosystem.
2) Synthesize: I synthesized my findings from my interview and affinity mapped them.
3) Review user research artifacts: I worked closely with a UX researcher and a UX designer on this project. I reviewed their synthesized research insights to understand users' biggest pain points in using data at Fannie Mae. I specifically looked for pain points that confirmed what our stakeholder felt were our users' pain points.
4) Craft a narrative: I love using The Business of Story's framework for storytelling, especially from a product point of view. I took my findings and bucketed them into this framework to begin to tell a product story.
What I produced
A product story for OIH, including:
• What’s at stake with bad data: help users understand why the product exists
• What’s at stake with bad data: help users understand why the product exists
• How OIH can simplify how users access data across Fannie Mae
• Space for an OIH product demo, live or recorded
• How to get started with OIH and how it plays well with programs you already use
What I’d do differently
The product is still in production and won’t launch until mid-2021. If our team was still working on this engagement, there are a few things I’d do differently.
• Add some way to measure effectiveness: I’d love to measure effectiveness on two fronts. The first: since our stakeholder is using this presentation, it’d be great to understand how useful he finds the presentation. The second: how useful is this doc in helping users understand the why behind the product. One of my favorite survey tools is Mentimeter, so I’d opt to use that to get quick feedback after this presentation is used.
• Create a new user onboarding flow: I’d want to incorporate elements of this presentation into the new user onboarding flow. Whether it’s help content, product-triggered emails, or orientation content in the product, grounding users in why the product exists could help them understand why it’s useful, versus forcing them to use another tool, which sometimes happens at Fannie Mae.
• Do more of my own research: I only interviewed our main stakeholder. I would have loved to speak with other leaders who would manage teams who would use OIH. What do they care about when it comes to managing data? What are their concerns?
• See our stakeholder present this work with partners: since our main stakeholder wanted a basic narrative around OIH to support him as he had conversations with leadership ahead of the launch. I'm interested to see what kind of questions and comments he gets so I can incorporate that into the narrative.
• Include value propositions on a website: most of Fannie Mae products their own landing page and can be found via a repository. OIH doesn't have one yet and would rally to include it in the listing.