1. Intro
2. Problem
3. Process
4. Design
KPMG

Brick
by brick

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Scroll to see the project
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Intro

Context

The Advisory team at KPMG was looking develop a tool that would simplify the property bookkeeping process for their clients. Due to a mandatory change in the Swedish accounting regulations, clients would have to update their property balance sheets by providing a breakdown of each property's components and their lifetime value. Compared to the existing process of reporting a building as one complete component.

Impact of the regulation updates:

30 K+
Housing co-ops impacted
120
Large entities with real estate portfolios

The Task

Lead an initial discovery with the Advisory team to identify opportunities for an MVP solution that they could use to build a stronger business case and secure leadership buy in and funding.

Project goals

Lead discovery
Plan and execute a discovery phase that would help develop a stronger understanding of the problem space and identify areas of opportunity
Create MVP prototype
Deliver a prototype that the team could use to shop around with clients to gauge initial interest of the product and validate demand
Secure executive buy-in
Help the advisory team build a strong business case to secure buy in and funding from the executive team

The Problem

How might we simplify the financial reporting of real estate assets to ensure large Swedish entities are compliant with new accounting regulations.

process

Understanding the problem space

To start the project off, my self and the second designer on the project (Fredi), carried out interviews with 4 stakeholders from the Advisory team. We split the tasks of leading the interviews and note taking so we each had a chance to lead 2 interviews each.

Our goals for the interviews:

  • Get an idea of the advisory team's expectations for working with us and what their vision for the project was
  • Develop an understanding of the existing accounting process and what kind of impact the new regulations will have
  • Begin to identify pain points & areas of opportunities

Insights

Based on the patterns we saw and anecdotal evidence gathered from the product owners and other customer facing teams, we determined there were 3 core problems we wanted to solve for.

Existing solution does not scale
Excel sheet used as current solution. Hard to keep track of all data esepecially for larger companies
Manual Process
Existing bench marks and models could be used to automate instead of having to input all calculations by hand
Customer Education
Customers do not have the skillset to understand how to properly break down a property into components and estimate their respective values

Defining requirements

The next step in our process was to identify the needs of the users who would be working with this tool, and create a list of prioritized requirements that stakeholders felt would make an MVP.

This was achieved through a series of workshops where I asked the participants to each map out the positives and the negatives of the existing process.

Key requirements

Different User Types
  • Need to have different roles for users
  • Key roles will consist of Internal Admin & Customer User
Manage Properties
  • Ability to add properties to a company by hand or via bulk upload
    Reports
    • Generate reports that give a breakdown of each properties components
    • Ability to export reports for individual property or in bulk
    Add/Remove Components
    • Ability to add remove components to a report and see how it impacts the total value
      Knowledge & Guidance
      • Provide information at key parts of the experience to enable customers to be self sufficient in using the tool

        Design jam

        It was important for us that the advisory team were included in the design process as much as possible. Not only to promote collaboration, but also to leverage their domain expertise to ensure we were always on the right track and building something they would actually want to use and confidently sell to their clients.

        To do this we led a design jam. Over the course of 2 days we ran various exercises with the goals to flesh out the details for an MVP.

        These were the outcomes of the design jam:

        • A defined user story map that helped us plot out the keypoints in our MVP prototype
        • Flows for two different user types that we would be validating against
        • Concepts generated by participants that would help shape the final prototype

        Design

        The solution

        The following screens are taken from the final Prototype we delivered to the Advisory team. These are key touch points a user would interact with in the final experience.

        Overview page that shows the user all the reports they are working on.

        First step in the report creation process

        A generated report that a user is able to edit and export

        Information panel that provides users with information on how reports are generated and how to make adjustments if needed