The Challenge

CFA Institute is a global, not-for-profit professional organization that provides investment professionals with finance education.

Financial analysts from around the world must accurately describe their qualifying work experience as part of their application for CFA Institute membership.

CFA Institute wanted to ensure applicants clearly understood what qualifies as work experience, and looked to Centralis to help quantify whether a new design would provide an improved user experience.

The Process

To ensure the usability of CFA Institute’s proposed design, Centralis conducted an online quantitative study to evaluate the performance of the new design versus the current design.

Centralis created the new design and brought it to life with an interactive prototype. We also prototyped the existing site for an apples-to-apples comparison during testing.

Centralis programmed the study in UserZoom, allowing users to complete target-finding tasks to familiarize themselves with both designs. Then we asked a series of comparative questions to assess learnability and preferences across the two designs.

The Impact

Our data showed with 99% confidence that the new design would be preferred to the current design. Furthermore, the new design enabled participants to successfully learn what counted as qualified work experience and to recognize a non-qualifying job description.

In our final report, we illustrated statistically significant differences in users’ success when completing tasks with the two designs. Our results gave CFA Institute the confidence to proceed with the proposed changes.