FiscalNote Business Card Scanning

FiscalNote is a media and technology company specializing in corporate stakeholder relationship management and legislation analytics. Their Issues Management platform allows clients to build and track corporate relationships and assess the business impact of changes in legislation. I designed the experience and interface of the business card scanning feature for their upcoming Android app.

Client
FiscalNote

My Role
UX research, Mobile Design

Team
Individual Contribution

Timeline
6 weeks in summer 2019

Problem Statement

Business card scanning provides an easy way to add new contacts to your company’s directory in FiscalNote. The feature was already available on iOS and would be introduced to a new segment of users with the release of the Android app. The goal was to design an improved experience for the new users based on lessons learned from the iOS app.

My Role

As a part of the mobile team, I led the end-to-end design of the business card scanning experience, including all product research, stakeholder communication, design, and prototyping. I also set up weekly meetings with developers, designers, and account managers to iterate rapidly while considering diverse perspectives in my work.

Research Methods

Before approaching design, it was important to understand the problems with the current experience on iOS. I established a baseline with a customer journey map and a heuristic evaluation. Then, to discover customer pain points, I analyzed all JIRA issues related to business card scanning and documented my findings. Finally, to ensure a competitive solution, I conducted a market analysis of leading apps in the document scanning space.

Additionally, interviews with internal stakeholders from product and marketing teams revealed feature requests from clients that needed to be accommodated in the new design.

Core Customer Issues

Unpredictable Scanning

Scanning success rate varied wildly with the smallest adjustment to camera positioning, even under great lighting conditions. This was the most reported customer issue due to its frustrating trial and error experience.

Lack of Form Validation

The contact creation form did not proactively check for errors which meant users only discovered errors when they tried to save the contact. Only the email and phone fields were checked for errors.

Poor Usability

Small issues like redundant confirmation steps, lack of user education, and the inability to add multiple positions and organizations for contacts created hurdles that coalesced into poor overall usability.

Design Process

I created a list of tasks and user flows to identify edge-cases while designing. Furthermore, these flows grounded the solution in user intent. Due to time constraints, and an established design language, I opted to create high-fidelity screens directly and sought regular feedback from product and engineering teams to refine the solution.

Intelligent Errors

Designed to surface errors proactively and assist users in resolving them through actionable error messages.

Rescan Card

In the event of a blurry picture, saved the user time by letting them quickly do another scan instead of typing all details manually.

Create Organizations

A non-blocking way to create an organization for a contact when none were found in the company’s directory.

Phased Improvements

To support the phased beta rollout at the time, I created a series of incrementally complex designs that allowed the engineering team to deliver a good experience out of the box and prioritize improvements over time.

Project Documentation

Communicating the design to developers and internal stakeholders was critical to delivering the intended experience to our users. I created the following design spec to communicate all the research learnings in the context of the design solution and shared it with the team via Zeplin.

FiscalNote for Android was released in December 2019. Being a part of the team that designed and shipped this product was a phenomenal experience. My favorite parts were the daily design demos and weekly stakeholder meetings that raised the quality of the app with insight into client needs and engineering challenges. In hindsight, in addition to design critiques, I would also conduct in-office usability tests to ensure an intuitive solution.