Future State Financial Platform v2

TLDR

UX Design Lead @ Investment Firm

August 2018 - August 2019

Defined a future state platform that re-imagines how financial advisors manage their clients

Tools:
Sketch

Methods:
Competitive analysis, workshop facilitation, journey maps, wireframes

Over the years, an investment firm had built new applications and platforms on top of their existing infrastructure resulting in over 200 applications across different platforms, with varying styles and duplicative functionality.

The client wanted to define a future state platform experience that re-organized how information/applications were structured and simplify the features available.

I conducted a competitive analysis to understand where the client’s digital capabilities and experience stood in comparison to their competitors and other fintech disruptors.

I leveraged a day in the life study the client conducted to understand the end user’s biggest pain-points.

How financial advisors and support staff work together is determined at the individual level which creates a lot of variety in how responsibilities are divided and an unclear picture of who’s doing what.

Most of the users' pain points stemmed from having too many applications with duplicative functions, leading to cognitive overload and a decentralized system. Users didn’t know where to find certain information and processes would stop and start as actions span across different applications.

The platform could only be accessed on certain computers which hindered the new era of financial advisors who are not tied to their desks and require more flexibility.

Facilitated weekly workshops with the client where we aligned on a vision to re-imagine the platform as a browser experience.

Platform as a browser

Re-imagine the platform as a browser experience to provide platform access wherever you are, leverage native functionalities like persistent search bars, provide quick access to recent or favorites places, and the ability to open as many tabs as you want and the power to designate what those tabs are.

Consolidate Information Architecture

Developed an information architecture that introduced the concept of a “workspace” that thematically consolidated content/features to create focused places to work. This reduced the number of duplicative features and simplified where information can be found to create a centralized system.

Faceted search

Using a faceted search gives users the ability to navigate to a workspace and set the context at the same time. This increases findability, as it no longer relies on users to memorize a large menu structure, and introduces a healthy level of flexibility that supports a wide range of working styles and responsibilities.

The second phase of the project received partial funding as there wasn’t an appetite to re-think an entire ecosystem of existing applications, so we had to pivot.

Working with our client we scaled back the future state and defined a pilot program that used a chrome extension to provide users access to key applications, organized by workspaces, from the browser. Leveraging Chrome’s default capabilities, the development team expedited the build time which kept key functionality in scope such as the faceted search and tab structure.

Outlined the difference in experience

The design team examined a multi-application workflow and created a user journey that compared the current experience to the browser experience to articulate the difference and communicate how the experience should be built using the chrome extension.

Created best practice standards

The design team researched default browser behaviors and put together a strategic guide that outlined best practices for the development team to reference.

Lessons Learned

Looking back on the project, the future state vision we created was ambitious. It didn’t take into consideration the current infrastructure and how much change would be required to achieve it. If I could redo the project I would have pushed to have a tech representative during the first phase of the project - as the tech team’s buy-in and constraints drove a lot of what was in and out of scope during the second phase. Additionally, this project would have been a great opportunity to partner with a product manager to deliver a prioritized roadmap on how to achieve the future state.