Example Reflection – Rapid Prototyping

Challenge

My team produces regular market analysis reports that were there going to be made more  widely available within our organization.

This change meant that our reports would be read by colleagues of various departments and  with different levels of understanding regarding market-specific developments and technical  language.

Our main challenge was to improve the appeal of those reports and increase the number of  people that read them on a regular basis, regardless if they have a finance background or not.

Therefore, our goal was to explain market developments in a more accessible way to colleagues  that work outside of the department. At the same time, the reports had to maintain enough  information and accuracy in order to continue to be useful for colleagues who follow financial  markets more closely.

Therefore, we set a task force with 2 colleagues (myself included) that was dedicated to  reformulating the reports.

Selection

The task force chose Rapid Prototyping, which is a tool that was used to test and refine  different versions of the new market report, according to the feedback of the managers and  the other market analysts.

Application

First, we assessed the current report and which information was still useful and what could be  simplified or summarized. Then, we revised other reports, both of our Bank and of other  institutions, to assess the current trends in data visualization and incorporated past feedback on  our reports.

Then, the Task Force created Prototypes with different options, both in terms of colour schemes  scheme as well as type of document (word vs powerpoint presentation). Each prototype was  quickly submitted to the managers and the rest of the teammates and, with each iteration, their  feedback was used to refine the report.

From the feedback, it was clear that we need to have a separate and shorter page, that could be  detached from the rest of the report and easily read by the casual reader. The Task Force  included a cover page that had a summary text of the financial developments of that wee with  the style of a newspaper editorial. The cover page also included small tables with the main  market movements. The goal was to give need-to-know information to the casual reader.

Also, we settled on a weekly report with less text, bigger Font size and fewer and bigger charts,  that changed from week to week. We also used conditional formatting to highlight the main

changes. Apart from the cover page, the remainder of the report had a page dedicated to each  market segment, in order to continue to provide an in-depth analysis of the week’s events.

We also created a mini layout, that included a chart of the week and two or three summary  sentences, to be included in the main website and could be redirected to the full report.

Insight and Approach

By applying the rapid Prototyping tool, the task force was able to incorporate feedback very  quickly that allowed us to rethink the way that the report was done. This approach also allowed  the test of different options, before committing to the implementation of the new report, which  would entail a bigger overhaul of the datasets and relevant charts.

Another approach that could have been used is Customer co-creation, and gather the insight  from different potential readers in the construction of a market report that was suitable to their  needs.

