BluePrint Product Suite
Fund Investor Experience
Product context:
As part of our go to market plan, we needed to build out an investor experience which our fund manager clients could offer to their investors.
What was this project about?
Think of a banking app you use to check an account balance. Maybe its Chase to check a credit card statement, or Vanguard to see your retirement savings. We aimed to build a user-facing experience much like one of those for people who invest in private equity and hedge funds.
This piece of the product would be used by our client’s clients. The complexity for us was to provide a user experience that our clients (fund managers) could control for their clients (investors).
I delivered a functional prototype which involved:
Designs for navigation architecture
Scalable UI framework for dashboards
Designs for Investor-facing dashboards and manager control screens
My responsibilities:
Working closely with head of product/owner for clarity on his vision
Learning the business need for fund managers, clarifying what’s valuable and dismissing old assumptions
Close attention to data structure, architecture needs, and business cases - helping me honing our short- and long-term vision for this experience
Collaboration with UI architect, particularly on defining our framework for dashboards and the structure of standard components involved
Presenting to stakeholders for review and final decisions
Navigation architecture
I designed a strategy for supporting fund investment lifecycle with navigation. This solved for the fund manager need to “turn on” various offerings for investors, an integral part of a fund manager’s business.
Investment dashboards
I designed investor-facing dashboards which provided the ability for an investor to view fund performance with account-specific details. The complexity of this task arose from needing dashboard data to match fund-type. Designs contributed to aligning back-end architecture with the business need.
Dashboard card component
Addressing our goal of building with reusable, scalable UI elements, I delivered a new component definition for our design library. This dashboard card was the result of many vetted alternatives, ultimately fine tuned to address variables needed for both current and future dashboard items on our product roadmap.
Impact
My work within this project generated focus and clarity across teams responsible for taking this design through to production. Our collective effort resulted in successful delivery of our MVP Fund Investor Experience on time. Due to my close collaboration with internal fund services team, the designs I delivered matched the precise needs of both target audiences. The resulting Fund Investor Experience was praised by investors and fund admins because of how little help was needed to use it. Compared to legacy feature releases, this feedback meant we were moving in the right direction delivering intuitive user experiences.
My Personal Reflection
This project showed me the value in considering beyond usability and efficiency for use of a feature supporting a complex financial process. In fact, I gained the perspective to consider how a user’s lifecycle in this domain will evolve in the context of a business model. In my earliest experiences as a designer, I looked to expert guidance for what they wanted the design to accomplish and so the user could complete a work task.
The work I did in this project revealed growth in me as a designer because I framed design alternatives in a way that spoke to my senior leaders, such as how one initially favored design option introduced complexity for development and produced a poor experience. Namely, I pushed the team to eliminate unnecessary complexity.
This project took on servicing a different user group than our existing platform. The early work I did to understand their set of distinct needs within our business context helped not only service user needs through design but, communicate across the team why each decision mattered in this case.