SmartStream Technologies is a financial services firm that specialises in transaction lifecycle management solutions. Their services aim to enhance operational efficiency and cut costs for financial institutions by automating processes and improving data management.
SmartStream's product suite covers various stages of the transaction lifecycle, including trade processing, cash and liquidity management, reconciliations, and corporate actions.
By utilising technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, SmartStream enables clients to achieve higher accuracy and compliance in their financial operations.
Almost six years into my profession, I decided on a career change and studied UX Design while working at Hedgeserv. Upon completing this course, Smartstream Technologies extended an opportunity to work with them as part of their design team as a UX Researcher.
I grasped at the opportunity to contribute to Smartstream's cutting-edge financial service software, transferring a host of skills I previously gathered at Hedgeserv.
This is a concise summary of my duties, skills I gained, and typical procedures I was responsible for at Smartstream.
Responsibilities
Conduct user research methods including user interviews, surveys and user testing sessions.
Review research findings and analyse user interview scripts.
Create and maintain research repository on Dovetail and user personas.
Always advocate for the user's needs and preferences throughout product lifecycle.
Collaborate with design team and assist with translating business jargon related to financial software.
Stay updated with UX trends, methodologies and tools.
Daily tasks
Reach out to clients in respectable manner to involve them in upcoming user sessions.
Plan and execute user interviews, user tests and survey distribution for example; NPS surveys.
Meet and work closely with internal stakeholders to build relationships.
Document research findings through meaningful insight reports for future use.
Review competitor products and industry trends to inform design decisions.
Perform qualitative and quantitative research to provide informative data on things like number of users, sentiment data, location data etc.
Daily goals
Continuously build our teams research repository.
Improve Figma skills and keep reports structured and consistent.
Expand relationships with stakeholders.
Keep our clients informed with the progress of our research and design lifecycle and maintain healthy relationships.
Meet project deadlines and deliverables assigned to me.
User research methods
Gained proficiency in various research techniques such as interviews, surveys and usability testing to understand user behaviours, needs and preferences.
Usability evaluation
Improved my ability to evaluate the usability of products through heuristic evaluation, usability testing and analysing user feedback.
Experimental design
Constantly worked with designers to execute experiments to test hypothesis and evaluate design decisions.
Performed usability tests to action this and measure the impact of our changes on user behaviour.
Data analysis
Gathering large amounts of qualitative and quantitative data has improved my ability to analyse data and uncover insights and trends related to our products.
Empathy and understanding
Developed a deeper understanding of users' perspectives, motivations and pain points.
This is something I found essential for advocating the users' needs through our design process.
Critical thinking
Evaluating design ideas, identifying research questions and tying together complex information constantly improved my ability to problem solve and think critically.
Communication skills
Presenting research finding, insight reports and recommendations to cross-functional teams and stakeholders has drastically improved my communication abilities.
This is something I look to continuously improve on, in the form of storytelling, visual communication and persuasion.
Service design methods
During my time at Smartstream I was involved in service design methods such as user interviews, surveys, observing the user and engaging with them as they perform tasks.
As well as this I was crucial in developing personas, journey mapping, collaborating during co-creation workshops, evaluating our service and providing KPI's through qualitative and quantitative research.
