Fidelity International - Financial Advisor workstation
Redesign of financial advisor workstation
My role
I was contracted in for 6 months as Senior UX Designer, leading the design of a portal for financial Advisors for high-wealth clients. The team’s business Agile process was quite technology-led when I started on the project and I was keen to initiative more discovery research into the design thinking process. I assisted with setting up interviews with Advisors as part of an exploration into their daily lives. The findings helped us establish the beginnings of a customer journey map.
Brief
Conduct a full redesign of Fidelity’s bespoke financial advisor workstation, allowing Advisors to initiate fund transactions and generate reports for their high-wealth clients. According to stakeholders on the project, they knew there were numerous usability issues with the current system as they were frequently receiving complaints from the Advisors who used the system. My job was to review the current system and conduct a redesign of the system, starting with the Report Builder section, which was one of the most commonly used (and complained about!) parts of the portal.
Contextual Inquiry
I started out gathering requirements for the redesign from the stakeholders within the team. There was an existing system in place which the stakeholders knew had usability issues as there were numerous complaints about the system frequently coming in from the financial Advisors that used it on a day-to-day basis. My first instinct on the project was to gather information directly from the users of the system to find out more. Over the first week I was able to schedule some time with some Advisors who were generous enough to let me meet them in their work environment, shadow their daily activities and let me observe them using the Advisor workstation system in their contextual environment. Some of the key findings from the research:
Customise report option - Advisors often were frustrated with not being able to customise their reports and tailor them to what they thought their clients would be interested in
Multiple documents open at once - Advisors tended to have to have multiple documents in front of them whilst they were building their reports, e.g. having to flip between client account information and the report builder
Affinity diagram
After the contextual inquiry I conducted a data analysis of the findings by clustering the main themes using an infinity diagram. This helped me to identify a set of user requirements to focus on for the report builder tool. Some examples of the outputs were:
Provide functionality to customise sections of the report so Advisors can tailor it to their clients’ interests and remove parts that are irrelevant
Include account details information in report builder so Advisors don’t have to switch between two screens/documents
Save time but adding quick selector options for dates, e.g. Tax year, Since Inception, etc.
Sketching exploration
Based on the requirements that came out of the Contextual Inquiry I mapped out a basic user task flow and started exploring multiple design concepts that could support it. E.g. below are two examples of various other ideas that I explored:
Single page form - (left image) allowed user to input all the criteria of the report in one page and then select ‘generate’
Progress indicator - task is broken up into multiple steps with progress indicator to guide the user
Initially, I hypothesised that the progress indicator concept would be easier for users as it broke the tasks down into chunks but subsequent user testing indicated that it wasn’t necessary and it just created extra clicks for the user.
Usability testing in the lab
I built out the two design concepts into an Axure prototype and we tested them in usability sessions with Advisors. The sessions were moderated by dedicated researchers in the team. We worked with them prior to the sessions to define the study and script. The goals of the test were to enable us to see which of the two report builder designs would be best for usability: the single page form or the progress indicator.
The findings showed that there wasn’t much difference in terms of usability between the two, but the single page design was quicker and more efficient as it didn’t require as many (continue) clicks overall. This would potentially amount to a greater benefit for users in scenarios where they had to complete multiple reports one after another and they had limited time.
Final Design
After various rounds of low-to-mid fidelity sketching and testing I produced the final design below, which captured the key user requirements as per the initial research with regards to customisation, account information, and quick date-select options like ‘Tax year’ and ‘Since Inception’.
Project challenges
Developers were based off-shore and it was sometimes challenging to sync with them in real time due to time differences, so it was important to establish regular online cadences. It was also difficult to gain access to end-users (the Advisors’ clients) on this project but we were able to talk to as many Advisors as we needed in order to gain an understanding of their needs. Advisors were very keen on providing feedback to the system and we were able to work very closely with them, including observing them conduct tasks on the current system within their work environment, and collaborating with them in co-creation workshops.