Katie Palermo
Secondary Research
Background
When customers integrate with a bank’s APIs, multiple user groups rely on the API banking website. A recurring question from leadership was how we should position the experience: should we prioritize the developers completing the integration, or the financial users—such as operations teams, finance managers, and CFOs—who ultimately rely on the APIs in their daily work?
During a period of organizational transition, my lead designer and I wanted to better understand how stakeholders across the organization viewed this question. By capturing their perspectives, we created a clearer picture of existing assumptions so that incoming leadership would have context on how their teams were thinking about our users and priorities.
Methodology & Research Questions
To start with what we know, I developed an IWIK (I wish I knew) survey that was distributed to leadership and stakeholders. With multiple gentle reminders, we received 35 responses from designers, content, product, engineering, sales, strategy, and customer service.
There were two journeys, an embedded finance team and a connectivity solutions team. Users were asked what their roles were and which journey they were on. Questions started by asking users how confident they were that they knew their audience, who they believed the target users were, and what they wished they knew about their customer's and what they needed.
Questions:
Identify your role
Do you work on embedded finance, connectivity solutions, both, or neither?
What is your role on the team (product, design, content, accessibility, development, strategy, or other)
How confident are you that you know your target user(s) and their needs
Please rank who you think are the target users
Developers
Financial daily taskers
CFO/ financial leaders
CTO/ technical leaders
Third party platform providers
Enterprise partners
Other, please specify
What do you wish you knew about your customers and their needs
What do you believe to be the customers greatest pain point(s)
Rate on a scale of most interested to not interested on each of the following topics
How easy is it for customers to discover new products
How easily understood are our products and services to our target users and their teams
How relevant are our products to our customers
Are integration and maintenance within our customers technical capabilities
What is the perception of ongoing maintenance
Are we communicating with customers at the right time in the right way
Would users be interested in additional resources (such as a learning center)
Are we considered best in class from our customers
How are we perceived in the competitive landscape
Does our documentation meet our customers needs
Are we properly preparing our users of what to expect prior to integration
Are our current webhook capabilities meeting our customers needs
Are there any topics not previously addressed that you think are of high importance
Of the items you felt were the highest importance, why do they matter to you and your role
Please share any additional questions, comments, or concerns
Results
We learned that the findings from previous studies were not well distributed to external teams and answers existed for a quite a few of the stakeholders questions.
I took the information we have that was relevant to questions asked and created one-sheeters that outlined each study, who the audience was, what we asked, and what we learned. Each card was linked to the relevant study then I did roadshow tours where I walked stakeholders through high level findings and walked them through how to read the cards.
We were also able to make a list of topics that would be appropriate for future studies.
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