What You See Is What You (Can) Get? Designing for Process Transparency in Financial Advisory Encounters

In this paper, we report on a study to establish process transparency in service encounters of financial advisors and their clients. To support their interaction, we implemented a cooperative software system for tabletops, building on transparency patterns suggested by the literature. In evaluations, however, we found that our design did not improve the perceived transparency and comprehensibility. Introducing the IT artifact into advisory failed to enhance the client‟s overall experience and even seemed to negatively influence the client‟s perception of the advisory process. Using the representational guidance of depicting the process and its activities as a navigable, interactive map made clients believe that interactions with their advisor were restricted to the system‟s functionality, thus expecting that what they see is all they can get.