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 B2B2C 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

  1. Designs for navigation architecture

  2. Scalable UI framework for dashboards

  3. Designs for Investor-facing dashboards and manager control screens

My responsibilities:

  1. Working closely with head of product/owner for clarity on his vision

  2. Learning the business need for fund managers, clarifying what’s valuable and dismissing old assumptions

  3. Close attention to data structure, architecture needs, and business cases - helping me honing our short- and long-term vision for this experience

  4. Collaboration with UI architect, particularly on defining our framework for dashboards and the structure of standard components involved

  5. Presenting to stakeholders for review and final decisions

Navigation architecture

The site’s foundation caters to the fund investment lifecycle through navigation. Given our back-end infrastructure which facilitates turning on and off parts of the site with feature flags, I focused on delivering an end-experience that would feel seamless to investors at any investment stage with different site areas exposed.

Investment dashboards

Investor-facing dashboards challenged my hand at making data visualizations of value to an audience with a small window of use each month. I prioritized simplicity of style and straightforward visual insights. Through research with end-clients I identified “the facts” they needed to find and ruled out developing charts that users admitted they’d skip.

Later, a survey confirmed user sentiments of delight and satisfaction tied to ease of finding the information they come for.

Dashboard card component

Building with reusable components was a top priority of ours. Since this was the first dashboard within the product, I crafted a new component for our design library which later improved our development speed of dashboards built later for differing user groups.

Leveraging high charts for data visualizations, we needed a structure to add charts of many varieties. I worked closely with the lead front-end developer finding clever, multipurpose properties. The resulting component addressed a vast range of functional opportunities for different user goals and contextual requirements.

Impact

My work within this project generated focus and clarity across teams who brought the designs to life in production. Our MVP was delivered successfully with little design drift. This was a win for our maturing design team. Beyond the successful delivery, we learned of high praise from investors who had migrated from the legacy platform. Investors valued simplicity of use and clarity of navigation. Our log in records showed over 80% of users who logged in last month, returned the next month. This surpassed our benchmark for end-client engagement, nearly tripling the engagement we had observed on our legacy fund investor portal.

My Personal Reflection

This project needed to serve a different user group than our existing platform (so far). The early work I did to understand their set of distinct needs within our business context positioned our team for success. Not only could I design with purpose for these users, I gained the perspective and verbiage to communicate across the team why each decision mattered in this case.

Looking back at my approach to this project, I recognize growth in myself as a designer. Early on, I catered to what senior leaders proposed as the best design. Here, I built upon initial concepts my senior counterparts proposed. I framed design alternatives in a way that spoke to my senior leaders and it pushed our solution to be better for the company and users.

A stand out moment occurred when I demonstrated how an early “favorite” design among leaders would introduce complexity which would cost development effort and actually move away from our target users’ interests. My proposed alternative solved this problem and the team not only backed it, but was relieved we didn’t go the other direction.