Project: User research

Client: Financial Ombudsman Service

Category: Ombudsman

Responsibilities:  User Research, Expert evaluation, Identifying key issues and priority areas for improvement

The Challenge

We were engaged by the Financial Ombudsman Service to conduct an extensive research study, which included user testing of new website designs as well as key areas of the existing site. This study aimed to uncover usability issues and inform a prioritised improvement strategy.

Highlights

• Created detailed research plans and interview scripts
• Conducted user interviews with 20 participants, including consumers and business representatives
• Created a detailed findings report outlining research insights alongside our recommendations for UX, content, and design improvements.

Intro

The Financial Ombudsman Service is an independent public body, established by Parliament, that resolves complaints between financial businesses and their customers in a fair and impartial way. Their website serves a crucial purpose as the main channel for consumers to learn more about the Ombudsman process and to submit their complaints. The Financial Ombudsman Service has set a goal to make their website less complex and more user friendly. As part of this they redesigned a series of key landing pages and came to us in order to help them validate their design decisions and ensure they are going to help them achieve their goals.

Conducting Research

We agreed to conduct research with both consumer and business participants, the two priority audiences. With the help of the Financial Ombudsman Service we found representatives from financial services, business participants who deal with consumer complaints as part of their day to day. We also recruited fifteen participants representing a diverse cross-section of the general public. Over the course of one week, we conducted twenty user testing sessions in which we discussed the new website designs, as well as sections of the existing site, and probed them on comprehension of content, expectations of functionality, and general usability.

Our Findings

We used our preferred research tool ‘Dovetail’ to transcribe and tag the interviews, before pulling out the insights and grouping them into themes. We began to see some common threads emerging. Overall both consumer and business participants reacted very positively to the new designs and thought they were straightforward and easy to use, however there are a number of UX & design amends that could be made to improve the experience further. We put together a detailed presentation deck, breaking the research insights down by category with supporting quotes and suggested improvements. Then we presented this to the stakeholders at the Financial Ombudsman Service and finished off with a discussion of our key takeaways and the priority next steps for the organisation.

Outcome

We really enjoyed working with the Financial Ombudsman Service on this project. It is such an important service that helps hundreds of thousands of consumers. But with more complaints being filed every year, they need the digital experience to be as seamless as possible, ensuring consumers can self-serve and get all the crucial information they need. By incorporating our recommendations based on evidence, they can help improve the website experience for users. If your organisation needs help validating a new direction or design decision with users, get in touch!