Storytelling

Challenge  In the financial services sector, due to regulatory needs all incidents need to be registered and its  consequences measured. An incident in this context is every occurrence where a process fail, such as a  payment not being processed correctly or a system being unavailable for a customer. The collection of  these, along with the assessment of consequences (e.g. extra hours, fees, penalties, loss of market  share), is paramount to predict the amount of capital that needs to be reserved for risks and to avoid  systemic instabilities in the market.

The problem is that, although extremely relevant, this process is cumbersome and time-consuming, as  people have to individually analyse each occurrence and liaise with multiple departments to estimate  correctly the impacts. This leads to subpar notification on most banks and an underestimation of the  required capital to sustain these risks. The challenge then is how to simplify the identification and  quantification of these events in order to provide a realistic picture of the institution exposure.

Selection  The tool selected to help tackle this challenge is storytelling.  The purpose of this tool is to ensure that  the design process capture the users’ needs and the value we want to deliver. A good story makes it  possible for all the participants to empathize with the users and ensure that their work is well  represented.

According to Aristotles, there are seven elements of good storytelling:

1- Plot – What are the character(s) doing and what are they trying to accomplish?  2- Character – Who are the people, their traits, backgrounds, aspirations?  3- Theme – What is the end goal or obstacle that needs to be crossed?  4- Dialogue – How do people interact, are they angry, sad, happy?  5- Melody – What are the emotions that set the tone to this?  6- Décor – What is the physical environment and limitations in which the users perform their acts?  7- Spectacle – How the audience remembers that story? How is it relevant?

Application  In order to apply the tool to that particular challenge, we began by defining our target users with  personas. These personas were refined through interviews with selected sample of users from different  roles (business, finance, IT…) to envision their experiences and understand how they perform the  process.

After that, we created the plot, outlining how the current activities are performed in the existing  systems and identified the conflicts between each team on a journey. During that process of  understanding the personas emotions and conflicts we were able to identify steps that were not

mapped and hindered the interaction between multiple departments preventing the goals to be  achieved in the best way possible.

Approach  While the storytelling and the necessary interviews are an important step to map the user journey and  increase the empathy with their challenges, the usage of a visualization tool as the basis for this sort of  project could be interesting.

Specially in scenarios (or stories) with multiple interacting users that could be used as a way to simplify  the understanding in a graphical manner of all the relationships involved in the “plot”.

We could also enhance the interviews with more in-depth techniques to elicit more information from  the interviewees, as in this initiative no particular technique was used.

