TRUE FUND ACCOUNTING

Abila | MIP Advance

FULL CLOUD MIP FUND ACCOUNTING 

Abila was in need of updating its market-leading fund accounting application, MIP.  It is what has set the company apart from its competition.  They were in need of two things;  taking MIP into the cloud (they were primarily on-premises based) and modernizing the look and feel.  I was hired to lead the user experience, interaction, and visual design of the entire effort.  This was no small task.  An accelerated schedule and complexity that could rival most projects, we needed to be on our game.  Also, 90% of our development and QA team were in Bolivia.

It was critical that the existing MIP offering's user functionality/feature set, use cases, and interaction patterns be reused as much as possible.  Project management deemed this as a top requirement with respect to transitioning the userbase to cloud technology.  Adoption would be an issue and familiarity was of the highest concern.  I was among an Austin lead team consisting of a UX director, development manager, project manager, architects, and a quality assurance lead.

Please contact me for an in-depth Case Study on this project

 

ROLE

Lead UX, Ix, IA, & Visual Design

PROJECT DURATION

8 months

RESEARCH & GROUNDWORK

After embarking on a lengthy research process with the internal team, I developed a persona to inspire and guide the project.  We also created system taxonomies and UML flows to keep the effort on track with respect to scope, requirements, and schedule.

 

SITEMAP AND WIREFRAMES

A sitemap and comprehensive wireframes were built for the project to serve two purposes.  One, for internal discussion and ideation and two, to serve as an artifact for milestone review and approval.  These wireframes were very effective for moving the process along and to convey ideas to stakeholders and most important, development.

 

STYLE GUIDE

A style guide was needed for the project for everyone to adhere to company brand guidelines and stick to the final approved direction for the UI, interaction patterns, and user flows.  One additional reason this style guide was crucial for the project (above regular project considerations) was due to the communication and distance gap between the Austin and Bolivian teams.  It was critical to be as precise and clear as possible when conveying ideas, flows, patterns, and any other element of the deisgn across the international team.

The Bolivian team mentioned they had worked with many designers in the past and that this style guide was the best, most complete style guide they had ever seen.  This was in part due to the addition of all primary and alternate user flows complete with annotations so that no detail in the design should be misunderstood.

 

CHALLENGES AND MOVING FORWARD

There were many challenges the team faced at all phases.  What we learned early on was that the selection of Tableau as our dashboard and BI tool was not what was originally intended or estimated from the vetting process.  While Tableau is a powerful tool, unfortunately, it was not user friendly, responsive in the manner needed, had a very steep learning curve for developers and designers, and required extensive overhead to operate (an additional two servers).

We managed to utilize the Tableau team in Austin for in-house consulting and iterated over the span of roughly a month to provide a custom implementation.  We managed to come up with a three tier approach to drill down for the dashboards that was satisfactory to management.  All other elements of the design were manageable by the Austin and Bolivian team and we moved forward in an effective fashion.

 

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING

The usability team and I were testing throughout the entire project to ensure the voice-of-the-user was heard and incorporated.  The team and I ran four large scale external tests (one at the annual conference that was very effective) to garner feedback for the product and to see if we were on track with the design.  It was fantastic to have a dedicated usability team to handle the logistics of usability testing.  I assisted with the scripts, facilitation, note taking, and analysis. 

We received high praise for the new product and users and stakeholders were eagerly anticipating the projects release.

 

PRODUCT RELEASE

MIP Advance was released in July 2015.  The experience from this project was invaluable.  While working internationally was not new to me, the unique challenges it posed were strengthening to my career.  I even had a chance to fly down to Cochabamba, Bolivia to meet and work with the team.