Alert Dashboard v2
TLDR
UX Designer @ Investment Firm
August 2017 - May 2018
Re-designed an alert dashboard to inform financial advisors why an alert occurred
Tools:
Sketch
Methods:
Interviews, wireframes, workshop facilitation, visual designs
An investment firm was standing up a goals-based planning platform and wanted to rethink their current alert dashboard to create a streamlined workflow
for financial advisors.
The investment firm has rules that determine how financial advisors manage their client’s portfolios. Whenever there is a deviation between the firm’s rules and a client’s portfolio or account an alert appears in a dashboard. To create an intuitive solution that drives action I needed to learn what the rules are, how they are triggered, and how they are resolved.
I worked with the business team to understand the different types of alerts, what they meant and how they are rectified.
Table I put together after working with the business analyst to start grouping and defining alert types.
I interviewed financial advisors and their admins to better understand what wasn’t working with the current dashboard.
The current dashboard didn’t tell you why the alert was triggered. The financial advisor/admin had to go to another application where they would learn what happened and then take action.
The dashboard wasn’t checked often because some of the alerts would resolve themselves. For example, fluctuations in the market could trigger an alert but the issue would often go away over time.
Not all alerts are created equally. Some of the alerts were more severe than others and there was no way to understand how many required immediate attention.
Alerts had deadlines and consequences if they weren’t handled in a certain time period, however there wasn’t a way to convey the priority or urgency of alerts.
Alerts can exist for individual accounts as well as the portfolio the account is in, which means the dashboard needed to show that relationship.
I designed solutions that would take the guesswork out of an alert and inform the financial advisors/admins of priority.
Conceptual testing was done by a third party and the results confirmed that users could intuitively use the dashboard and found the changes impactful.
High-level Summaries
The pie chart provides the breakdown of alerts across categories and acts as a filter, providing the user insights and access into which errors can be dealt with now versus later. The section on the right includes a reminder of upcoming milestones with color indicators to denote severity, improve transparency and help the financial advisors prioritize the alerts.
Solution #2: Flexible Views
Dropdown allows financial advisors to change how the table is organized and gives the option to group alerts by type, individual instances, and client for optimal flexibility and focus.
Explain what caused the alert
Table rows are expandable and when selected the financial advisor would see modular content that explained the root cause of the alert. Depending on the alert, the modules would display the target vs current risk profile, the relationship between the portfolio and account, as well as the accounts or holdings that are contributing to the alert. The user would still have to go elsewhere to take action, but now they would know exactly what they had to do when they got there.
Lessons Learned
This project was my first time leading a work-stream and I learned so much about managing clients and workloads during this engagement. Knowing what I know now, it would have been beneficial to consult the development team during the initial concept phase. A lot of QA support was required once the development team started to build the dashboard. If they were closer to the concept, the development team could have had more autonomy during the build phase