PROJECT
Rates Content Management System (CMS)
OVERVIEW
Michigan State University Federal Credit Union (MSUFCU) is the largest university-based credit in the world with over 284,000 members, $4.5 billion in assets, and more than 900 employees. The Credit Unions headquarters is based in Lansing, Michigan and houses all internal departments including in-house IT and remote services teams.
MISSION
At the Credit Union, various departments including those that work with consumer loans, mortgages, investments, and savings products, continuously update their rates for members. Prior to this redesign, each department was doing this in a unique way using a variety of processes and systems, and updating at different intervals. On the back end, each department was using bits and pieces of different CMSs and servers.
Our mission on this project was to:
Create a CMS that would consolidate the way rates were updated throughout various departments in the CU
Digitize and automate various paper processes used by employees
Reduce the margins of error when updating rates
Create transparency and tracking for internal audit purposes
AUDIENCE
Employees that periodically update rates in various departments
Internal Audit team
RATES CMS USER JOURNEY MAP
ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES
The team consisted of two software developers, one UX designer, and a project manager. As the UX designer on this project my responsibilities were to:
Understand the similarities and differences of how each department was updating rates by mapping out user stories
Uncover pain points and processes that could be automated
Functionalize and error proof data fields to remove potential user input errors
Become familiar with the design constraints of the CMS framework
Create an testable interactive prototype that could demonstrate user story solutions to gain feedback for future iterations.
SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
In consolidating the data structures and creating a universal CMS for updating rates we recognized that we would be changing a workflow for four individual departments and would therefore need to budget time for testing, revisions, and training.
We also recognized that for a period of time, employees may feel that this new process was unfamiliar and more cumbersome than their usual process.
Because this redesign was not commissioned by any one individual business unit and was the brainchild of the development team working to improve our data structure, gaining buy in and adoption from the business units would be more challenging.
PROCESS
First, I sat down with an employee from each department that updates rates to document their process.
Next, I sketched out all these unique user journeys and combined them into one universal workflow. This allowed our team to discover inconsistencies with our mental models, insights into unknown processes, and similarities within the workflows. This informed our data structure, and information hierarchy.
Next, we made our list of requirements for the prototype based on the CMS framework and began ideating with whiteboards. This informed our data structure, and information hierarchy.
These turned into wireframes and eventually an interactive prototype.
Our next step was to share our prototype with stakeholders, in this case, the executives responsible for ensuring rates were updated and the employees updating rates.
VIEW THE RATES CMS STAKEHOLDER PRESENTATION
After sharing the prototype with each department and observing them using the prototype we collected the feedback needed inform the second phase of design and development.
WHAT I LEARNED
As a team we were able to successfully consolidate various rates processes into one universal rates CMS.
Antiquated code structure was cleaned, entities were minimized, and code was brought to current standards.
Each department was given appropriate editing capabilities with the enhanced ability to schedule upcoming rate changes.
Enhanced visibility for management, audit, and software development teams.
Functionalized data fields reduced the margin of user error.
In our testing of the prototype we revealed further requirements that helped us to scope our next design phases.