Institutional Consultant Website
As an old architecture was being decommissioned, we were tasked with integrating a site for institutional consultants into a site created for institutional investors. The focus of our work would center around a new “consultant dashboard,” which is a custom dashboard where consultants can manage what investment documents and products they’d like to save for later viewing. In addition to creating this new, personalized experience, we also needed to map user tasks and content overlap so that we could responsibly account for all the deliverables that were needed.
When our project first started, there were a lot of disparate pieces of information that were coming to us. As associates were assigned to the project, the scope of the requirements and the systems that any updates would touch became difficult to understand, and too complex for any one person to know the way. We felt that a people, process, systems workshop would help our stakeholders understand who they may need to speak with next, and uncover some of the hidden considerations that might be hiding in the gaps. The workshop was a success, the associates could now see most of the requirements’ scope in one place.. Action steps were initiated and the project started to take a reasonable shape.
We knew that we needed to merge another demographic of professionals into the current site that we were migrating to, but we didn’t know how to get users to agree to legal conditions, pick the correct role for themselves, understand the value proposition of signing in, then sign in without getting confused or dead-ended. Early drawings helped us to understand how the sites needed to merge for the best on-ramp experience possible.
Our first order-of-business was to create a site map, which would help us determine what navigation states we needed to create, and would give us an impression of what content would become redundant between the old site and the new site.
After developing an understanding around what technical limitations we would encounter, we decided that it would be healthy to build user personas, one for our investors and one for our consultants, so that we would know what features to build to best accommodate their needs.
We started to chart out user scenarios in order to understand how users would need to work through the experience, and how the system would need to respond to each of the users’ actions. This helped us understand what questions we would need to ask our stakeholders and development team.
As we developed personas, a list of tasks emerged that our designs needed to cover. Each key task needed a journey that was clear and evident to our users, so we set out to write a story that would string all tasks together.
A story emerged. Each step in the journey accounted for our personas’ most important functional tasks. We created a document where we asked as many questions as we could for each step in the journey, then got to work calling product owners, developers, legal consultants, stakeholders, and marketers to get the answers we needed to move forward.
In the end, we were able to create a simplified and polished dashboard experience. We ran the dashboard through usability testing with relationship managers and coworkers who worked within other segments of the business, as access to our audience was prohibited. Users could clearly understand the dashboard’s purpose, and intuitively understood how to make their own collection of strategies, subscribing to email updates for their favorite products along the way.