BigFuture

BigFuture needed a UX (user experience) design that would simplify a complex process, enabling visitors to easily understand the product and navigate the site proactively.

Background

As an online financial advisory startup, BigFuture assists people to adopt better financial habits through interactive educational material and analysis, giving the average person access to the sophisticated financial tools that are usually only provided through a Financial Planner.

BigFuture had been together as an organisation for five months and had completed their specification and scoping work, including the development of a relational database in Ruby. They realised that they lacked front-end development and the UX skills to pull the project together. BigFuture required expert advice and assistance with their project and selected reinteractive as Ruby on Rails specialists after receiving a recommendation from a fellow industry source.

“We knew we needed to spend 2 – 3 weeks doing UX before we moved into development but we debated amongst ourselves; ‘What is UX about? Is it really that useful?’ We were a little suspicious and asked the question – ‘was it necessary?’ Once we went through the process it became very clear that it was a vital and key part of the process. Building great user experience requires interaction design; it plays a pivotal role in helping define what works best for the users.”

Donald Hellyer, Co-Founder & CEO – BigFuture

Engaging reinteractive

reinteractive sent in our UX designer to kick-off the project, starting with the wire framing and process outline. Over a three-week period she worked closely with the BigFuture team to research and clearly define user expectations and then map out steps for a greater user experience.

“reinteractive brought a degree of expertise that we didn’t have. There was a real disciplined approach about what worked and what didn’t work. They were very good at breaking down a complex offering into more digestible parts, that communicated and people can relate to. Their consultant was able to hold her ground and put across an experienced and workable solution in instances where some of our team had very strong and fixed ideas on how it should look.”

Donald Hellyer, Co-Founder & CEO – BigFuture

This was followed by user testing. The proposed designs were tested on a target audience to see what worked best and to uncover any weakness in the design. Donald commented, “It was really useful! It turned out to be a great investment as it gave us very good feedback as to what worked and what didn’t work and how our users would navigate the web pages.”

Investing in thorough UX research with our reinteractive team enabled BigFuture to have a clear, concise, well-tested outline of the user process. It enabled BigFuture to acquire a robust set of designs as a strong foundation for the backend requirements and ongoing development.

Benefits

• Ability to test processes with target audiences using interactive prototypes to uncover and correct any design weaknesses before the app goes into production
• Ability to increase customer satisfaction through usability testing to ensure the app’s success
• Overall simplification of the development phase by outlining processes in detail with reinteractive’s UX expert

“reinteractive had an extremely valuable and disciplined approach, with ample resources for us to access advice for other areas of our project. reinteractive are a great bunch of people”

Donald Hellyer, Co-Founder & CEO – BigFuture