HITACHI CAPITAL PERSONAL FINANCE are a leading personal financial services company, providing innovative finance solutions to customers across the UK.

The MyHPF team were tasked with delivering a contemporary, streamlined, web app for Hitachi Capital Personal Finance customers to enable them to self-serve, and easily manage their personal finance products on desktop, and mobile devices.

As the lead User Experience Designer on the project, I led the user research, user experience design, and user interface design as part of a multi-disciplinary agile delivery team.

The primary objective was to reduce customer calls to the call centre by allowing customers to self serve and administer their loans and accounts online. With this in mind I planned and performed a series of research activities to identify user goals and needs. The user needs identified were supplemented by the business requirements produced by a Business Analyst, and were used to create an Axure prototype for user testing.

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The user testing largely validated the product concept, but revealed valuable insights including: 

• Users were confused by the consolidated Make a Payment and Settle Loan flow, suggesting three distinct journeys were required – make a payment, settle loan now, and get a settlement quote.

• A number of users failed to understand the select loan/agreement UI interaction . This crucial element was subsequently improved based on the feedback. 

With the product vision established, the prototype was updated to fix the issues identified in user testing and this was used as the basis for Agile just-in-time design, during which I performed further research, ideation, and UI design. 

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Results

The web application was very well received by internal stakeholders, and Hitachi Capital Personal Finance customers...

The new website is much easier to use.

I found it really easy to pay off my loan. Thank you.

Customer feedback received by the Customer Service team

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