Case Studies > FINCAD Analytics Suite 2009

Overview

FinancialCAD Corporation (FINCAD) is the industry standard for financial analytics, providing derivative analytics tools and services to over 35,000 financial professionals in over 80 countries.

Goals

• To enhance the overall user experience, with special attention to product licensing process for new users.
• To include additional analytic functionality already slated for the release.

Paul's Role

Paul was hired to help redesign the user interface for FINCAD Analytics Suite 2009 (formerly FINCAD XL) which provides industry standard financial analytics for use within Microsoft® Excel.

Challenges

• Tight timeline and limited changes possible to existing core functionality. Acceptance by the established user base of any interface changes was critical.
• The legacy licensing system, requiring product keys to be delivered by email, presented challenges in terms of improving the ease of product activation.

Approach

• Based on a set of existing user profiles, a task-centered design process was used to elicit from subject matter experts regarding common use scenarios of the product.
• A detailed expert usability inspection was done to identify usability issues within the current interface, including the overall process of obtaining licensing keys and activating the product.
• In close collaboration with the Product Development Team, early design explorations were reviewed to ensure that the proposed design was generally feasible both in terms of technical constraints and the project timeline.
• The Product Development Team worked in parallel to map out revisions to the licensing process and through a series of collaborative usability review sessions. The resulting interface was made more efficient and less error-prone.
• An extensive set of black and white user interface mock-ups were created to support several key tasks-flows. These were usability tested with local surrogate users who shared the financial domain knowledge of the actual target audience.
• FINCAD Product Management was trained in conducting informal usability tests, and these tests provided additional feedback with regards to the proposed user interface changes.

Results

With an enhanced user interface, FINCAD Analytics Suite 2009 for Excel enables users to locate, review, and add financial functions to their own Excel spreadsheets more quickly and easily. In addition, the licensing process for new users was streamlined and made more error resilient for an improved first impression.

FINCAD Analytics Suite 2009