"Being able to be collaborative and get to the functional requirements sooner in the process has allowed us to reduce definition timelines by about 33% across the board."

– Director of User Interface and Experience Design, Global Lender

Background
This customer is the preeminent financial services institution with greater than $1 trillion in assets and over 200 million customer accounts in more than 100 countries. The customer's lending division was recently tasked with overhauling its eCommerce Web site to comply with new information security and FCC regulations and to address the problem that 80% of customers that started the online mortgage application process dropped out of the process before completion due to poor usability.

Challenge
The customer's lending division traditionally relied on text-based requirements documents and static screen shots to describe complex systems, but stakeholders often had difficulty understanding proposed functionality and providing feedback, which made it impossible to accurately validate requirements prior to coding. Customer application developers were left to build user interfaces for new applications without adequate user data, resulting in delays getting new business systems to market and applications that were poorly adopted. Ultimately, over 60% of these projects did not meet business goals.

Result
The customer created a new division within the IT organization focuses on user-centered design. The new division used iRise to simulate a new version of the online mortgage application, which enabled the customer to test and validate proposed new interfaces directly with customers in the project discovery and research phase. The new division presented the simulation during focus groups, listening labs, usability studies, profiles and surveys to clearly establish and document user behavior. During these sessions, the team iterated the simulation to validate requirements and assure customer satisfaction before any coding began.

Leveraging iRise, the new division decreased the project's requirements and functional definition phase by 33%, realized a 66% reduction in the prototyping and user interface design timeline and achieved an 88% time reduction in task analysis and documentation.

In sum, the vastly-improved eCommerce Web site, which was estimated to be completed in 1,600 programmer hours, was delivered in fewer than 650.