KPMG Ignition Tokyo:
Designing the digital transformation of KPMG Japan member firms and external clients
UX Design / Design Research / Consulting / IT
As a consultant and UX designer at KPMG Ignition Tokyo, I worked with various KPMG Japan member firms as well as external clients to design and support their digital transformation processes. Since they are all under NDA, I will share a brief overview of key projects I worked on and the lessons learned.
DATE
February – March 2019
ROLE
User Researcher
RESPONSIBILITIES
Conducted field research to understand user’s needs and pain points at festivals and with general payment systems
Planned insight workshop to share research findings with stakeholders
Planned ideation workshop to generate and consolidate ideas
TEAM
2 Senior User Researchers
1 User Researcher
PROJECT 1
Defining the user experience of an enterprise solution for tax clients
As a UX lead of an agile product team, I worked with a product manager, product owner, a team of business analysts, engineers, and data scientists to define the user experience of an enterprise software for tax clients.
Collaborated with product, engineering and data science leads to articulate roadmaps, define strategies and lead the feature development
Conducted user research such as contextual inquiries, usability testings, surveys and in-depth interviews to understand user’s behaviors and needs as well as to validate design solutions for product improvements
Built user flows, wireframes, and prototypes to articulate a multi-channel workflow and communicate interaction design concepts to stakeholders
Organized and facilitated workshops with internal team members to communicate research findings and insights to co-create personas
PROJECT 2
Defining the user experience of an enterprise solution for tax clients
As a UX lead of an agile product team, I worked with a product manager, product owner, a team of business analysts, engineers, and data scientists to define the user experience of an enterprise software for tax clients.
Collaborated with product, engineering and data science leads to articulate roadmaps, define strategies and lead the feature development
Conducted user research such as contextual inquiries, usability testings, surveys and in-depth interviews to understand user’s behaviors and needs as well as to validate design solutions for product improvements
Built user flows, wireframes, and prototypes to articulate a multi-channel workflow and communicate interaction design concepts to stakeholders
Organized and facilitated workshops with internal team members to communicate research findings and insights to co-create personas
Key takeaways
The UX maturity was relatively low when I first joined the project as a UX designer. At the time, the UX designer was regarded as “a person who makes a wireframe according to client request.” Furthermore, the client and user of the application we were developing for were often the same people, further making it difficult for UX designers to take initiative in proposing design ideas or conducting user research, as often, the clients would claim that they “know what the user wants” (which is mostly untrue). Given the situation, I had to spend my first year on the project building trust with internal and external stakeholders before I could start any basic UX initiatives.
Here are what I did and my key takeaways from the project:
Anticipate user/team needs and prepare materials for various scenarios. When preparing a mockup/wireframe/prototype to show to your stakeholders, make sure to play out the conversation in your head in advance, so that you can prepare varieties of visual materials ahead of time. This might sound like a lot of work, but if you do this you can get a lot of decisions made in one meeting.
Speak the same language as your client and user. If developing a solution for domain experts, learn about their workflows, terminologies, competitors through desk research. Go through archive and read past documentations.
Understand and articulate tradeoffs in decision-making. When proposing multiple ideas to stakeholders, make sure you communicate pros and cons of each idea, including: development cost, feasibility, complexity, usability. Also make sure you are in alignment with your team on which idea you want to recommend to your client before client meeting.
Keep the design process open and inclusive. Make sure to always show your work to the team throughout the design process. Not only would you want to check-in to ensure your design is viable and feasible, but also your team may have a great idea for the challenge you’re designing.
“People think and feel differently, even if we share the same goals. So, instead of trying to force ourselves to fit in, I realized that we could just keep going together, while acknowledging our differences.”
– Participant of general class, CforC 2020
Outcome
How have the participants changed after participating in the program (surveyed with CforC 2020 participants)?
93.5%
of participants answered that they “started to think about thoughts and feelings behind children’s actions and behaviors”
48%
of participants answered that “children opened up to talk to me about what happened at school”
38%
of participants answered that “children opened up to share their dream with me”
Find out more:
→ CforC 2020 annual report (available in Japanese only)
