Overview
Summary
By leading the design process, developed a powerful automation tool, while also promoting a culture of design.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Impact
The time taken to rebalance a teams portfolio was reduced from 2 days to 15 minutes.
Creating a new process
Overview
Jarden is looking to scale up its service operations while preserving its personalized approach.
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Recently, a new tool was deployed that enabled advisors to automate portfolio rebalancing. While rebalancing became significantly easier, the process of documenting and justifying was still a slow manual process. This bottle neck needed to be resolved to realize any improvement in the process overall.
Design environment
The design space has grown to be a recognised stage in the development cycle. Users are now willing to engage with design as it has a history of creating valuable solutions. Stakeholders now come with problems, rather than prescribing a solution. A trust has been established that design can generate the best results.
​Objective​
Resolve the bottle neck and create a scaling solution for documenting and justifying trades.
Discovery
The Wealth Management department functions much like the wild west. Advisory teams operate in small groups, develop their own practices, and view others teams as rivals.
I love this situation as it allows me to identity patterns through research which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. I started by interviewing teams about their current process. How do they work? Why this way? What was the desired result? How had they created their own workflows?
I conducted structured interviews, remotely, with 5 advisor teams (16 individuals in total) to understand the current process, pain points, and any differences between how teams work.
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I opted not to conduct a survey as earlier attempts indicated users did not respond to written forms of communication.
Findings
The interviews were a lot of fun. I leveraged their egos to get strong engagment. Each advisor team was strongly opinionated about their process, and the direction the design should take.
To control for one interview over influencing decisions, the findings were synthesized through clustering. I also started clustering items around stages in the process to identify patterns.
A pattern was already starting to emerge. I wanted to consider how each unique user group will have to adapt. I developed a process map that highlights the key divergent points between teams. This enabled me to consider the unique solutions each group had developed for a specific step. Sometimes the best solutions are the ones the users have created themselves.
New Journey
I combine the maps of the existing process with the research findings to aid in developing a new journey. Each stage contained individual user stories which enables developers to consult on the impact and costs of potential features.
UI Testing
Users did not engage or respond well to lo-fi or basic wireframes. The concept was too abstract for the technical nature of the process, and users became frustrated when trying to understand the design. I created a high-fidelity interactive mock-up in Figma to test with users instead.
I listed my assumptions, the pain points I was trying to address, and the predicted user interactions. During the interviews, I would review these with the user to determine in which direction the design should progress.
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Testing interactive designs enabled constructive feedback on what tweaks were needed. Users responded very positively to being able to critique interactions, as they were keen to reduce friction in such a high frequency tool.
Redesign
Testing feedback primarily focused on struggles with identifying areas of interaction. I redesign our text input box to provide a clear distinction and CTA.
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​The redesigned process received universal support from users.
Impact
Portfolio rebalances occur more often when the market increases in volatility. This feature was deployed during the covid market crash and subsequent rally.
The time taken to rebalance a teams portfolio was reduced from 2 days to 15 minutes.
The tool elevated the base level of customer communication across the advisory cohort, which furthered the company mission of excellent customer experience.