The redesign of Zarion Allocate required Graphic Mint to take a useful but outdated tool and elevate it to an intelligent, relevant and modern standard. The project goals were to adapt to changing financial service processes, while also creating a level of user-centricity which had never before been achieved in work allocation software. The new Zarion Allocate is a product which gives financial service professionals pleasure to interact with and rely on. The project consisted of three key stages; User Research, Framework Design and Detail Design.

Our research team began by opening a revolving door of real user feedback. Through this, we learned that supervisors felt overworked and disconnected from their personnel, who sometimes felt undervalued and anonymous. In Framework Design we immersed ourselves in the supervisor’s ecosystem. We studied and visualised their environments, relationships, goals, workflows and the type of work items which are allocated on a day-to-day basis. In Detail Design, we created features which addressed user pain-points and humanised the product.

Dynamic information presented in the User Interface now gives supervisors full transparency of team operations. The introduction of profile pictures created game-changing empathy between supervisors and personnel, by simulating face-to-face interactions. This has humanised their professional relationship and tackled the anonymity of office environments. This enables them to make fairer, more democratic work allocation decisions. Control and ease-of-use has dramatically decreased the learning curve and established the trust users need to rely on the system as a valuable tool. The Zarion Allocate Marketing Team now find the product easier to demonstrate, as customers immediately recognise its value.

Graphic Mint’s entry is deserving of a UX Award because Zarion Allocate is now a game-changing advancement of user-centred design in the financial services sector. We recognised the potential for impacting people using the product day-to-day through User Experience Design. The most exciting challenge for us was creating quality, more human-like interactions in an industry defined by impersonal work allocation software.

Since Zarion Allocate was an existing product, we knew it was critical to understand the product’s history of user interactions and current user behaviour prior to redesign. Our design team studied real users in the field to gather both direct and indirect feedback. This research helped define the scope of the project through storyboards, user journey mappings, conceptual explorations, UX and UI designs; all of which required user and stakeholder consensus at every stage. Our collaborative process ensured we aligned end-user’s needs, goals and expectations with Zarion’s business and development requirements.

The modern UI, new personalised experience and intuitive micro interactions are simple in design but powerful in effect. Their value is obvious to Zarion’s new and existing clients who quickly understand this focus on User Experience has also reduced office anonymity and helped build stronger relationships in the workplace. Some of the new features tackle real user pain-points such as supervisor visibility of what personnel are actually working on, what their abilities, capacities, skill sets and efforts are.

The UX and UI standards achieved with this redesign are being used to implement consistently rich experiences across Zarion Software’s full product suite in the future. This means the user-centric effectiveness of Zarion Allocate’s redesign will have far-reaching effects beyond the scope of this product; perhaps even on the next generation of financial services software to come.