Summary
Early design ideation and high-fidelity workflow mockups for a product whose working name was, The Agreement Manager, an app that enabled fast, scalable, single workflow negotiation, consolidation, and affirmation of legal, contractual, and operational data and terms for collateral agreement between two or more financial institutions.
The Agreement Manager sought to significantly reduce the time and effort required to maintain a repository of agreement data by digitizing and simplifying the process by which 2+ financial institutions agreed to terms so they could transact financially-compliant business together.
This was essentially taking a laborious, hard-copy paper process of emailing, overnight-mailing, and creating a digitized workflow that allowed all parties to a deal to see clearly where they aligned and agreed, and where they had remaining differences to resolve, so that they could negotiate more quickly to a settled contract.
Please Note: Unfortunately due to client confidentiality, I can’t post images of the Agreement Manager here but can provide samples of my work upon request.
My Role
Acadia, formerly AcadiaSoft, is a Fintech startup headquartered in Norwell, MA, that has a risk management and messaging automation platform that serves the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions (JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, The Bank of China, The Bank of England, The Bank of Japan, to name a few). The platform enables these companies to engage in regulation-compliant Collateral Management as part of their financial portfolios. Acadia also serves as an industry collaborative to bring about standards and regulatory compliance in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.
From June to December 2016, my focus was designing an MVP that digitized the Agreement Manager workflow. The paper contract process involved agreements that are dozens of pages long and the current manual process was laborious and slow. Reaching agreement involved overnighting large hard-copy legal documents back and forth between attorneys and concerned parties until all terms were settled. Needless to say this process was costly and inefficient. But this also wasn’t just signing an agreed upon document as you might do using, DocuSign. What the parties needed was greater transparency of the process, to see clearly where they aligned and differed, so they could reach agreement faster and more efficiently.
What currency to transact business in is an example of a term that needed agreement in the contract, e.g. The Bank of England and the Bank of Japan want to do business so they needed to agree whether to exchange funds in GBP, USD, JPY. This workflow needed to handle the change management for proposals and counter-proposals between parties and make the resulting agreement on that term binding.
The discovery process began by learning what we already knew about each party and the terms by which they operated in past agreements. By leveraging this metadata, we were able to match similarities in terms between parties and net the differences giving the target audience of attorneys or designated surrogates the transparency they needed to see and resolve conflicting terms. Discovery was further enhanced by further interviewing users who oversaw these deals in the Collaborative’s regular open call checkpoints, and whenever possible 1:1: sessions with a handful of clients to review iterations on the designed workflow. Sometimes getting together with these large financial clients located around the world meant getting up and presenting designs at 3 a.m. ET for example, to review progress with the Bank of Japan. The target users we spoke with were deeply invested in helping us find a more efficient way forward.
Our MVP solution organized data to indicate where parties agreed, and called out outstanding issues using a method of Progressive Disclosure. Importantly, many users expressed that they could see where they had differences existed enabling to move forward towards agreement.
While the Agreement Manager was the focus of contract engagement I also had the opportunity to design on other projects such as improving and enhancing the Acadia Platform’s workflow automation and navigation, and a brief but interesting exploration into visualizing a workflow for trade compression.
Challenges/Results/Lessons Learned
- No competitive landscape to contrast/compare notes. Usually when starting to design, I like doing an inventory and competitive analysis of similar or competing products to ground and spur inspiration, understand how others have already done it, and see if there’s anything to model against, or in some case see what not to do. Nothing on the market at that time B2B or B2C appeared to handle a complex change-management workflow at an Enterprise level. So we dug deep into the PM’s deep understanding of how agreements come together to drive the design, and created a flow with pixel-perfect Photoshop mockups, to drive home the ease of negotiating terms in a precise flow that worked and wasn’t overwhelming. Users could focus, progressively, on each section and move on, while having an easy view of what was settled or still up for debate. Lesson Learned: Sometimes trusting and working with what little you have is all you’ve got, and you have to find a way to forge ahead and and create your own inspiration grounded on what you know about user behavior and good UX practices.
- A PPT slide deck demo of key workflows vs. a working prototype. While we sketched out a proposed happy path and a possible workflow in pixel-perfect mockups, only key workflows were excerpted and placed in a Powerpoint Pitch Deck vs. an interactive prototype for stakeholder review due to background business and political concerns. While I believed a working prototype was quite important to prove the model, time, budget and internal strategy and the PM’s deep knowledge of the players in the audience, prohibited us from modeling it out as anything other than flat files. And in the end, showing key flows that were “almost done” as several believed, helped convince this sophisticated audience of the project’s overall goals, purpose, and viability. In fact, had we shown wireframes or demo’d a prototype that was not pixel-perfect and buggy, it would have sown doubt vs. confidence. Lesson learned: Sometimes jumping ahead of the process does make more sense strategically, when proving the premise is more important than proving out road and avenue.
- A MVP Agreement Manager built by an off-shored Engineering Team new to designers. With the project approved to move forward a newly-formed and distributed JP Morgan “Rapid Prototyping” team in Scotland and Hong Kong was tapped to create a POC. The team was new to each other, we were all new to each other, none of the engineers had worked with our company our PM, Tech Lead, or a designer before, and they were given only a loose requirements in the form of detailed walkthrough of the proposed flow that we had created in Powerpoint. These factors combined with missing details, and having to communicate across several different time zones, made the project initially slow to start. Lesson Learned: In startup, the team building your POC needs to be a tight, synced unit that knows how to work together. It’s also far easier to show pretty pictures than to prove a concept completely and it’s essential to go back and do the important work of good design. At the project’s start we should have engaged the new team in a schematic wire-framing phase to uncover developer concerns and questions instead of finding them on the fly. We would have also likely uncovered important interactions, use cases, and scenarios, that would have informed the work more fully. And lastly had we had an interactive prototype, we could have validated our assumptions through user testing and seeing where user succeeded, and more importantly, stumbled.