Bravura Solutions
Stanza A.I.
Myself and Bravura Solutions’ data science specialist was asked by the Head of Innovations to find ways to combine our expertise into potential new product offerings. The result was Stanza, an algorithm that can manage unstructured communications, such as incoming emails and PDF documents.
The brief
My data scientist colleague had been working on an algorithm that he believed could work out the intent of incoming communications, such as emails, with sufficient training by a human.
Stanza would vastly reduce the need for laborious and time-consuming manual processes to manage incoming communications for a large business, giving huge cost savings and accelerating data processing.
The main problem was getting Stanza’s accuracy up to a place where it could be trusted to run without any human oversight. Stanza needed to learn how to do its job as quickly as possible.
My role
I worked closely with not only our resident data scientist, but Bravura’s Head of Innovations, developers and Product Managers at various stages of the project.
Skills used:
Workshop
Ideation
Wireframing
Prototyping
Guerilla user testing
Visual design
Handover to development.
The problem
My main task was to create an interface that could be used by teams of individuals to train our algorithm. Auto generated results would be verified and corrected by humans, which would lead to an increasingly accurate result from the application, until the human training was no longer required.
To achieve this level of confidence, a large number of results would need to be checked at speed, so an efficient user centered interface for the people checking its results was essential to the applications success.
However, my very first task was to give this algorithm a name. Bravura’s main software product was called ‘Sonata’, a classical music term, so I decided to follow the theme and called this new product Stanza, meaning ‘a related group of lines in a poem or song; a verse’, which also linked to it’s goal of finding meaning in words.
Insight and research
Workshop
I ran a workshop with my data scientist colleague and a senior Business Consultant, to understand what the problems were that needed solving and start the process of white-boarding potential solutions.
It was the first time the data scientist had ever worked with a UX designer, so I started by talking through my approach to UX problem-solving, we wrote down words to describe the desired outcomes and followed that up with a description of what Stanza’s training interface should achieve.
The key takeaways were:
Enable the human user to work fast and efficiently, volume helps Stanza become more accurate.
Make the interface intuitive and easy to use
Ensure all the key pieces of information are collected and corrected.
User flow
The user flow was initially established during the workshop and further developed as more information and feedback was gathered.
Stakeholder interviews
Stakeholder interviews were conducted with the Head of Innovations and developers to understand business goals, key pieces of information needed, and technical limitations.
User personas
I created two user personas based on the information gathered:
Our primary user is a junior member of a large financial institution, happy to do laborious repetitive work
Our secondary user was the manager of the team. This user would probably not be going through any emails or PDFs themselves, but assigning work to the team and keeping an eye on how well Stanza’s algorithm is performing.
Early iterations
After the insight and research part of the process, I proceeded to these early low fidelity wireframes. We guerrilla tested these within Bravura and swiftly moved on to further iterations.
Outcome
The outcome of the project has been very positive. Senior management at Bravura Solutions has responded very well to Stanza, viewing it as an important new micro-service for future revenue generation. The initial design concepts have been turned into a fully functional prototype, and the product is being targeted at the fintech market.
Stanza has already been adopted by its first client, and Bravura Solutions is in discussions with multiple new and existing clients about its potential adoption, with several expressing interest. Overall, the project has been a success, and it looks like Stanza has a promising future.
Folks,
A massive thank you!
This morning we gave the Bravura board an update on our product and technology strategy. This was supposed to be a face to face session here in London, but given the current situation we did the meeting over Skype.
One of the things we did in the session was a Stanza demo, and the board were very impressed, which was great.
I love the way it pulls together our expertise in UX, web design and build, and of course AI into a product that really shows what great stuff we can do, as well as underpinning how much benefit we can get by adopting a modular microservices strategy.
So a big thank you to all involved in bringing Stanza to life.
Kind regards,
Nick Parsons
Chief Technology Officer
