Giro.tech is a sister company to Esparta and enlisted a newcomer UX intern and me to design and improve their platforms.
In a nutshell, Giro provides the tech for companies to process loans given out by their own clients — all types of shops and stores. Their platform would soon be overwhelmed by more workload.
We were first tasked with designing the web platform’s funds transfer experience within a couple of weeks.
I had designed for Giro before, but both of us were new to this service and its context. We ultimately landed a novel solution, but the aftermath revealed challenging workflow issues.
We began by collecting business information from internal and external resources, which we synthesized into a document.
A single analyst currently used the platform, so we set aside some time shadowing her work. This part of her job involved transferring loans to people who took them out in those shops and stores (the diagram's bottom arrow). It was a tiring and error-prone task: 60 transfers took her 2 hours of manual work. By my teammate's suggestion, we mapped our findings in a 5W2H matrix.
We then flowcharted the platform to better visualize problems and explore solutions. My teammate also created a blueprint to sort out roles, actions, goals, and outputs.
We put the most thought into relieving the repetitive tasks and supporting error management, leading to ideas involving bulk transferring and error visualization.
Fortunately, designing with base components and variants helped accelerate work without giving up experimentation and refinement. We were pleased to deliver and present the design on time despite the narrow deadline.
However, the development phase ended up inciting several changes, which cost unexpected time. This made it clear that sheduling checkpoints and having more engineering involvement was particularly paramount with Giro. Besides negotiating better deadlines, I then assisted my teammate to increase dialogue and to share work early and often.
I’m grateful to UX Intern Jady Torralvo for the stellar collaboration and Giro’s Rene Luan, Rafaela Zandonai, and Flávio W. for their business and engineering support.
•••
This was the first of many projects with distinct technical complexity and limitations. The later adjustments served as opportunity to establish better practices in future work.
Nevertheless, I believe the project thrived in its user-centered research and ideas. Undoubtedly, Giro’s emerging design practice will help impact their internal and external users.
