In this article, we report on design insights found during the evaluation of an innovative IT-artifact to support financial service encounters. Relating to previous work in this field, we carefully designed the artifact to omit any visualization and enforcement of rigid process structures, as those had turned out to be harmful. Our main design element was a mind-map-like content hierarchy to capture the client's situation. Surprisingly, we noticed that both clients and advisors talked about every information item visible on the screen just for the sake of completeness. They also followed a sequential process apparently inferred from the content hierarchy. We call this phenomenon "coercing into completeness". This phenomenon negatively influences the conversation between client and advisor inducing shorter discussion units and sudden, incomprehensible topic shifts. This article contributes an exploration of this phenomenon and its effects on the collaborative setting.

Recent research has shown that financial advisory encounters can successfully be supported with IT-artifacts. Tabletop scenarios, for example, can increase the transparency of the advisory process for customers. However, we have also had the experience that the relationship quality as experienced by customers can suffer severely when IT-artifacts are introduced. Based on these experiences, we developed guidelines for both, the artifact- design itself as well as for the environment in order to avoid this effect, and implemented them in one of our prototypes. The evaluation reveals that these measures proved to be effective. With the reported study, we seek to enhance our design knowledge of IT-supported advisory scenarios with a special focus on relationship building. In a larger context, we argue that the use of IT during sensitive face-to-face encounters will be of growing significance in the future but, as yet, is hardly understood. We make a contribution in this area with our generic requirements, design principles and evaluation.