rachel tarulli

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Brief

The Customer Experience Design (CXD) Team was asked to provide design strategy and UX/UI capabilities for the Fannie Mae Digital Alliances & Distribution Business and Technology Team to assist in the development of the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal, a one-stop-shop for Internal Fannie Mae Application Teams and external customers to on-board to the B2B Gateway.

WHAT IS THE B2B GATEWAY?

The B2B Gateway, in the current state, is a solution that provides configureable framework to exchange files with internal/external partners. It provides a standardized, streamlined means of integration with various technology solutions, and handles various data transactions protocols.

Meaning if an external customer or internal Fannie Mae customer wants to send/receive data to/from Fannie Mae, they need to be on-boarded to the B2B Gateway. The B2B Gateway helps to bridge the collaboration gap across the supply chain partners and transform the data flow between companies from a batch oriented manner into a real time, secure process.

In the current state, this process is a manual workflow completed via copious amounts of emails, intake forms, and excel sheets. This workflow causes an average on-boarding to take up to 4 months for Fannie Mae customers due to the constant back and forth nature of the manual workflow.

The vision of the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal is to provide an automated, one-stop-shop for customers to efficiently onboard to the B2B Gateway. This portal will encompass automation of manual processes which will have a cost savings of 10% on every B2B on-boarding project with a cycle time of an on-boarding to be cut more than half from 4 months to 2-4 weeks.

SCOPE

The goal of Q1 & Q2 of this work was to validate/refine current B2B Gateway requirements and develop the internal & external Fannie Mae B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal experience.

MY ROle

My role in this effort was to conduct human centered research through 13 stakeholder interviews and 4 current state service design blueprinting workshops, and 4 future state service design blueprint workshops to:

• Empathize with existing Fannie Mae Application Teams, B2B stakeholders, and external customers to understand the current state of the B2B Gateway on-boarding process, the user’s on-boarding experience, and uncover the user’s unmet needs.

• The objective of this research is to:

  • validate the current B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal requirements

  • propose short term and long-term opportunities for Q3 & Q4 to enhance the user experience of the on-boarding process

  • fuel the creation of user flows, wireframes, and a future state service design blueprint showcasing the backend technological capabilities needed for the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal

  
  

Research: stakeholder interviews

The goal of the interviews were to understand the interviewee’s:

• experience on boarding to the B2B Gateway (pain points, dependencies, and opportunities )

• responsibilities, needs, and desires in a Self Service Portal

Questions consisted of us asking interviewees to walk us through their journey on-boarding to the B2B Gateway and pinpointing areas of frustration and asking them how their experience can be more delightful for the future.

Research: SERVICE DESIGN BLUEPRINTing workshops

We scheduled time with key stakeholders involved in the B2B Gateway on- boarding process, including the B2B Gateway Team and the internal customers involved.

The CXD Team created an initial draft of the current state on-boarding process in MURAL by utilizing workflow documents and finding from initial interviews. During our workshops we were able to refine the blueprint, identifying both front stage and backstage:

• steps in the process (handoffs, dependencies)

• key stakeholders

• systems (technology, data)

• user experience (pain points, opportunities), and

• methods of communication.

research Synthesis & Uncovering Key Themes

Once both interviews and service design workshops were completed, I had two weeks to synthesis the findings from both research streams. I listened to recordings from each interview session and captured key data points and quotes on sticky notes. I compared data points from the blueprint and the interviews and started to affinitize data points together and group common themes.

Out of the data points, six key themes started to emerge:

• There is confusion on how to start an on boarding engagement for both internal/external customers.

• There is a lack lack of transparency around new on-boarding requests within the internal B2B Gateway Team.

• Internal/external customers struggle with following the unclear, outdated B2B Gateway on-boarding instructions.

• Internal/external customers are unsatisfied with the help they receive when asking for B2B Gateway on-boarding assistance.

• There is a complex, manual, and necessary PAM/RAM process that can hinder the B2B Gateway on-boarding process.

identifying opportunity spaces

With an understanding of key themes and quotes from the interviewees, our next step was to be able to identify opportunities on how we can improve the customer and employee experience. We created “how might we statements” for each key theme and started to ideate around each problem area on how we might go about improving the experience.

After identifying opportunities for each theme, we were able to make recommendations on what opportunities the B2B Tech Team and Business Team should focus on in Q3 & Q4. Our recommendations of short vs long term opportunities were determined by feasibility and priority of the customer and employee experience. These opportunities will impact the scope and feature set of the B2B Gateway-Self Service Portal.

Design DELIVERABLES

To communicate the research findings and opportunities to the B2B Tech Team and Business Team, I created and presented both a presentation and a final B2B Gateway Current State On-Boarding Service Design Blueprint that encompassed the findings and opportunities from the research onto one document. This blueprint was used as a guiding light to align all stakeholders, including leadership, on the vision of the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal and their next steps on developing a user centric product.

USER FLOW

Not only did we use this research to propose next steps and validate requirements, but we also used the research to fuel the creation of user flows and wireframes for the Self-Service Portal. Having a holistic understanding of the current state process gave us the ability to start to map out what we think the ideal experience would look like by persona; B2B Team, Internal Fannie Mae Customer, and external customers. The user flow and wireframe creation happened in parallel to the research. I conveyed the research findings to my CXD UX/UI partner Patrick Malley and we co-created the flows together.

future state B2B gateway Self-Service Portal blueprint

With developing a new, automated self-service portal, there is a lot of backend technological capabilities that need to happen. What we decided to do was to create a future state service design blueprint of what the on-boarding process would look like, from a customer perspective but also backend perspective. We utilized the current user flows we had and were able to layer on backstage technological capabilities that need to be there in order to create this experience for the user. This helped the B2B Technological Team understand what capabilities are needed when and where in the process and how they will fuel the user’s experience..

wireframes

With the research findings uncovered, I was able to communicate them to Patrick who created wireframes that depict the flow in which a customer would on-board to the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal. In the current state, this process is done through various emails, intake forms, and excel sheets, which is a very inefficient workflow that takes a lot of time.

With the B2B Self-Service Portal, we created an experience in which customers can enter the portal and self-serve by simply filing out their intake form, submitting it, and having an understanding of where their request is in the workflow process.

This will replace the very manual workflow process of sending forms back and forth, sending emails to check statuses of on-boarding requests, and will cut the on-boarding time in half.

 CXD Business outcomes

The purpose of the research was meant to validate/refine the current B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal requirements. Through the interviews and service design blueprint workshops we were able to document the current state on-boarding process and uncover key frictions experienced within the process by both B2B employees and customers. With theses findings, we were able to develop user flows, wireframes, and a future state blueprint for the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal that depicted the ideal customer/employee on-boarding experience.

CXD business outcome: The Customer Experience Design Team provided human-centered research capabilities for the B2B Tech & Business Team to provide opportunities to simplify and streamline the end to end B2B on-boarding process for internal and external customers that will increase customer satisfaction and result in a larger and streamlined amount of data transfers for Fannie Mae.

next steps

We delivered a list of short-term and long-term recommendations for the B2B Team to consider in terms of feature set and scope of the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal development for Q3 & Q4. The CXD Team continued to support the B2B Business and Technology Team by refining the future state blueprint, conducting usability tests with the current prototype, and made refinements to the wireframes all of Q3. The CXD Team’s contributions to this project over Q1 & Q2 impacted the successful first release of the B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal at the end of Q2.

Partner feedback: Rachel thank you for your design strategy expertise. Every work product you have delivered for this project has been of high quality and very insightful. The research and strategy findings, the customer onboarding blueprint, the pain points, and the usability studies are all outstanding work products that are enriching our project. Plus you are engaging and also fun to work with! Come to think of it, I have never seen you without a smile! - Chad Tyranski, B2B Gateway Self-Service Portal Product Owner

Thank you!

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My Contributions

Developed research plan and conducted interviews, developed and facilitated service design blueprinting workshops, synthesized & presented findings to Technology & Business Teams, identified areas of opportunity.

Team

Rachel Tarulli (Lead Design Strategist) & Patrick Malley (Lead UX/UI Designer)

Timeframe 

4 Months