CFO WORX
Connecting Business Owners with Funding Opportunities
TIMELINE
3-week sprint
TOOLS USED
Figma, Miro, Slack, Zoom, Google Suite
METHOD
The Diamond Diamond
THE CLIENT
CFOWorx is a one-stop shop providing modern accounting and tailored financial advisory solutions for startups and SME businesses. CFOWorx offers holistic accounting and financial solutions with a focus on effective reporting, strategy, growth and operations.
CFOworx is within the introduction stage of the product life cycle. As we're exploring the introduction stage it is best to build awareness of the service in their chosen markets. The goal for the business in the introduction stage is to gain market demand for the service. As CFOworx is competing competitively by having organised a place for founders to come to and access free, in-demand resources and opportunities efficiently.
MY ROLE
The team: Myself, Gus, Bernard, and Alex
As the lead communicator for the team during daily standups, I was responsible for taking minutes and asking questions to help the team understand how to overcome any obstacles we encountered. With organisation being a strong point for me I ensured all ideas and work were catalogued efficiently for everyone to navigate. I helped guide the team through the first diamond along with another teammate. It's important to note that this role was sometimes shared with other group members to ensure we all got the opportunity to develop these skills.
THE OPPORTUNITY
CFO WorX noticed that business owners and founders don’t generally know where and how to navigate the financial landscape to source funding and investment opportunities themselves, as they don’t know where to start and what might be available.
THE CHALLENGE
To create a public-facing solution and tool that allows business owners and founders - regardless of business maturity, to enter their company details and receive a tailored list of funding opportunities. This includes but not limited to government grants, venture capital, and angel investors.
The solution needed to be clear, accessible, and help drive increased traffic to the CFOworx website, while also acting as a valuable free resource for current and future clients.
THE SOLUTION
The solution we came up with is twofold
1| A filtering system that guides users through a few simple questions to identify relevant funding sources.
2 | Guided onboarding to help users unfamiliar with financial terminology understand how to use the tool effectively.
THE RESEARCH
INTERVIEWS
& SURVEYS
IA ANALYSIS
TASK ANALYSIS
MARKET RESEARCH
HEURISTIC AUDIT
COMPARATIVE
& COMPETITIVE
1 | Connect businesses with relevant funding opportunities
2 | Increase CFO WorX Web Traffic
3 | Provide a free resource for new and existing clients
We conducted a gap analysis of the current CFOwox website and found it didn't yet support the outlined objectives. We researched other platforms both local and global to understnad how they solved similar problems.
BRIEF OBJECTIVES
RESEARCH GOALS
1 | Understand how and where users currently search for financial business aid
2 | Gain an understanding of what motivates users and how they behave within this space
3 | Identify the core problem space, challenges and pain points users face
TASK ANALYSIS
We conducted multiple task analyses with comparative websites to CFO Worx, including Balance Tax Accountants, Grant Connect, SeedSpace, AirTree, Business Victoria and Swoop Funding. This competitive analysis helped us identify the steps a user must take to achieve the goal set, while also showing the current industry standards, and what systems, inputs and filters other websites are utilising.
TASKS 1 | To Book a Consultation or Appointment
2 | Search for Funding Opportunities.
INTERVIEWS& SURVEYS
Initially, we were recruiting business owners and founders, but we hit a barrier to gaining access to business owners who were available for interviews, so we had to widen our scope to include users who have conducted an online search for other products, like education loans, home loans and insurance. We expanded out to this target group as they have a parallel journey to navigate complex financial services, and understanding user motivations is essential to the UX design process. This helped us to take a wider outlook on the problem space.
We created two discussion guides, one for understanding users searching for financial aid and one for business founders. This allowed us to not only understand the direct target audience for CFO worx but also potential users looking for financial aid.
We distributed 2 surveys to get a more holistic (quantitative) understanding of users' challenges around decision-making in similar spaces. The data collected enabled us to see the commonalities around how users research new, unfamiliar, over-saturated and complex spaces.
Collectively from our interview and survey research, we found users struggle with decision paralysis due to too many options (supported by the Choice Overload Hypothesis - Scheibenhenne et al., 2010) and that users want all information in one place, but also simplified and easy to navigate.
COMPETITIVE & COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS
From initial research, we discovered that this market is saturated. I understood the vision of the client but saw a sizable gap from where they were to where they wanted to be. With so many others offering comprehensive help in this space we knew CFO worx USP would be the face of the business, Shelin. We began by looking at site maps to help bridge where we needed to get to.
We analysed the site maps of similar businesses such as
SeedSpace
Hnry
Colarus
Rimon
Balance tax
Airtree
Swoop
Grant Guru
The client noted that founders and business owners don’t generally know where and how to navigate the financial landscape to source funding and investment opportunities themselves, as they don’t know where to start and what might be available.
We needed to take on this and validate or disprove this through our research. We were able to validate this and I’ll show you now how throughout Primary and Secondary insights
WHAT THE RESEARCH FOUND
We conducted primary and secondary research into the industry to understand the challenges and pain points users experience. Through the research, we found that users looking for financial support get quite overwhelmed with the number of options available, not knowing which is trustworthy and efficient.
PRIMARY INSIGHT
TOO MANY OPTIONS TO CHOOSE FROM
SECONDARY INSIGHT
I NEED QUICK, CLEAR INFORMATION ALL IN ONE PLACE
Our key insights demonstrated a well-known phenomenon that psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper studied in 2000 (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000)
Persona
The Startup Founder
Sam, the startup founder, encompasses a person who has drive, ambition and has a need in life for efficiency. Sam's pain point is that she searches online but is overwhelmed by the complexity, doesn’t know what’s trustworthy, and often abandons the process altogether. She holds the challenges, behaviours, and motives we found most important to try and solve. As the business goal outlines, business founders are in need of a efficient one stop shop to a trust worthy financial support.
Sam thinks | "I need the right information to make the best decision"
Sam feels | Overwhelmed by too much information
Sam says | "This needs to be short, fast and easy to understand"
Sam does | Compares websites and gives up if the process is too confusing
THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
Feeling overwhelmed and unaware of the options available, Sam needs quick and comprehensive access to reliable SME financial business expertise so that she can grow her business.
CRAZY 8 DESIGN STUDIO | generated 64+ ideas
This helped to map out a Problem Prioritisation Matrix and then we voted on the strongest ideas.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE | Site maps & User flows
We did site maps for both the current and future-state websites and user flows focusing on the MVP filtering and onboarding experience. We researched best practices for filtering systems and financial resource tools, both nationally and internationally.
PROTOTYPING & TESTING
LOW FIDELITY
Our MVP prototype included: A resources tab with a simple question flow to personalise funding suggestions and users were directed to a tailored list based on their answers.
INITIAL TESTING FEEDBACK
-
Users didn't understand some financial terminology
-
The "search" button was mistaken for a typing field
-
Users didn't know how to proceed
MID FIDELITY
We addressed these challenges in three ways, by simplified and reordered the questions, using clearer UX writing and conventions for buttons and changed layout to better communicate flow.
FURTHER USER FEEDBACK
-
Users still felt unsure about what CFOworx offered
-
Some weren’t clear on how to start the filtering process
SOLUTIONS
Users still felt unsure about what CFOworx offered
-
Introduced a homepage prompt explaining what CFOworx offers
-
Provided a secondary entry point into the filtering experience
-
Enabled users to download/email their selected results
HIGH FIDELITY
Our final prototype was tested and refined with real users. It addressed accessibility, language, and flow clarity—ensuring it worked for both financially literate users and those new to the space.
