Sneak peak at the most current version of Advisor Dashboard.

Background

The Team

🧑‍💻 1 Interaction Designer (me)

🧑‍🎨 1 Visual Designer

🕵️ 1 User Researcher

🧑‍🔧 4 Engineers

🧑‍💼 1 Product Manager

Term Glossary

Wealth Advisor: a licensed professional who manages many facets of a client's finances.

Client: An individual that pays a wealth advisor to help manage their investment portfolios.

Household: A collection of clients that are contacted as a group, such as a family.

Project Overview

The Problem

Wealth advisors need to synthesize data across multiple disconnected platforms to effectively support their clients.

<aside> 🗣 How might we centralize the wealth advisor's data needs so that they can seamlessly perform their work tasks?

</aside>

Defining Success

My team was asked to create an all-in-one data solution for a major financial institution's wealth advisory division, with a potential multi-million dollar sales opportunity on the line. For the MVP success was defined by getting that major sale.

Product Requirements

Must have book of business data on aggregate, as well as each of the layers (households, clients, accounts).
Must show performance & risk data from FactSet's database.
Must show relevant news and research to provide additional context on investments.

Constraints

No usage tracking available.

Unfortunately FactSet does not build products in a trackable way, so we could not measure success through traditional usage metrics.

Sales-forward culture.

FactSet's product strategy is primarily driven by sales. This often means that design has to push product managers to buy into a user-centered process.

Research

Because the product was being developed on behalf of an existing FactSet client, we had direct access to the users for whom we were building. Our user researcher interviewed our future users and got a sense for their daily work, motivations, and pain points. We learned valuable insights about this previously unfamiliar user type that helped us approach the design project. Two themes of the job were consistent across subjects: client meetings and investment analysis.

🤝 Client Meetings

A majority of a wealth advisor's day is spent in meetings with clients, both in person and on the phone.
Advisors typically field questions from clients on the fly about the performance of their accounts or a specific security, all which need to be answered on the spot.
An advisor may only have a phone or tablet at their disposal in an in-person client meeting.

📈 Investment Analysis

Advisors need to come up with investment strategies for their clients. This requires them to dive deep into securities data.
Advisors need to keep extremely up to date on market news.
Analytical work requires large data tables and integration with Microsoft Excel, so this work typically happens on a user's work computer.

Product Recommendations and Opportunities

Based on the research outlined above, a few product recommendations were made:

All data should default to being grouped by client and/or household to align with our user's client-centric workflow.
A quick search across all data types is vital for answering questions on the fly.
Broader context should be provided when appropriate - think news, research, and corporate events. This helps advisors get the whole picture of what is happening with investments.