Designing for a Universal Market

Bridging the Gap

A nearly untouched market in the Japanese financial sector opened up to nCino with the introduction of the Collateral & Total Exposure feature. Working directly with our office in Japan, I helped piece together the experience for this product and the benefits it could also pose to customers in other markets.

Click on each image to view larger

  • Designing for a market outside of my own native country came with a totally new set of unknowns. We wanted to ensure that the Japanese market was the central focus of at least the initial requirements in order to maintain the international market value of the product.

  • The Japanese market views Collateral and Total Exposure in a loan context entirely differently from the North American market. Based on our research, we determined the Japanese approach would add a significant amount of value to the untapped American market.

Workflows & Wireframes

The first step was reviewing what we could gather about Japanese products and how they functioned. We wanted to supply a valuable product for the Japanese market that utilized similar patterns and information hierarchy.

We also didn’t want to alienate users in other markets, so we needed to take the overall experience for all markets in to consideration. Did this product make sense for customers outside of Japan?

I played around with various layouts and functionalities, communicating directly with our Japanese office and product management for feedback.

Challenges

Density of Information
A single collateral list could potentially contain hundreds of individual entries. It would be important to accommodate the highest possible number of entries in a compact space.

Navigation
Despite collateral and total exposure both being related to one another, they already existed as separate products in nCino.

Culture Gap
The Japanese financial market views the direct comparison of collateral and total exposure differently from their American counterparts. We would need to introduce a new way of working to our customers.

Scenario Builder Wireframe

Alternate Version Overlay Panel Wireframe

Wireframe for Final Version

Iterations

The product required two separate views; one from the perspective of examining the business relationship itself, and one from the individual loan level. We began with the relationship view, intending to add functionality at the loan level as we continued developing the product.

One iteration proposed a detailed data table for both collateral and total exposure to better identify each item.

Feedback from the Japanese office changed the direction towards a more high-level view of the information.

The final version presented to our Japanese office was a simple summary of both collateral and total exposure visualized side by side. It is the first part in a longer process