Equifax Story – Matthew Fiore

As Director of UX at Equifax, I was part of the technology team that created software products based on powerful financial data. I worked on 4 different data intensive software products, the bulk of which was spent on a product called AudienceIntel. AudienceIntel is an analytics tool, much like Google Analytics, that allows you to see the traffic of your website visitors. They key difference is that you can view the estimated financial and demographic data about those visitors, even the anonymous ones. This provides extremely valuable data to marketers to help them evaluate their online campaigns, landing pages, and ads. I wore many hats in my role at Equifax, for this product and others. I acted as Product Owner, UX specialist, and Marketing Lead at various stages.

From a product owner perspective, I organized agile planning activities at a quarterly and monthly cadence to prioritize backlog items into the highest priorities to assist our customers. I also spoke directly with clients to gather requirements and feedback on our applications. I wrote backlog item requirements for the development team to strict specifications and was the point person for all questions of product from the development team. I also performed some customer service related activities when clients needed issues resolved with our software or needed to be on boarded.

Here is a picture of one of our backlog grooming boards where we used Weight Shortest Job First (WSJF) methodology to rank and slot backlog items into the task calendar.

Backlog Calendar
This helps us track the capacity of the team and slot in the appropriate amount of work each sprint.

Weighted Shortest Job First(WSJF)
This methodology of prioritization uses the Fibonacci sequence to rank PBIs by User Value, Time Value, and Risk with an emphasis on the time to completion.

When I wore my user experience hat, I conducted a lot of testing on the marketing sites I managed. We primarily used UserTesting.com to reach out to the user personas that we were targeting to help us improve the layout, content, CTAs, images, and taglines on the site. Over the course of about a year, I conducted about one test per month which lead to incremental improvements on the marketing site to increase our conversions coming from SEO and SEM.

Here are some of the User Personas I created for this and other applications:

I redesigned all of the applications based on user feedback, persona research, journey maps and internal business stakeholder asks. Here is a Journey Map template I developed in Excel so that stakeholders across the business could fill it in with minimal training. I had to evangelize this effort and prove that the whole organization could benefit from doing Journey Maps to quantify the customer experience and identify pain points that need to be resolved.

I also played a large part in the marketing efforts of these products as I managed the updates to the WordPress sites. A WP developer and marketing specialist reported to me for much of this effort. In my first week in the role, I stood up their first marketing SAAS site. Over the course of the next few years, we continued to iterate and improve on the sites, based on direct user feedback, business asks, and data driven analytics. You can see the progression of the site as we continued to make subtle changes on a bi-weekly basis.

I also worked on a few mobile products while at Equifax. This particular product was meant to tackle the arduous experience at car dealers and tries to eliminate all the desk time both before and after the test drive. The idea is to arm the dealer salesperson with all the information on their phone to assist the customer with the test drive, pre-approval and loan origination process.