Workflow Optimization & UI Overhaul
Lead UX Design for the complete redesign of a 20 year old platform used by financial analysts.
Client
Morgan Stanley is a global financial services company that provides a range of investment banking, securities, wealth management and investment management services.
Project Challenge
Renovate a twenty year old platform by improving key task workflows to reduce time to completion. The redesign must maintain a balance between necessary complexity for advanced users, and a clear “next step” for junior associates.
Context
The custom Excel tool had been used for over two decades by financial analysts around the world to create and maintain financial models. While the backend was under refurbishment, our team was tasked with optimizing the workflow and bringing a modern update to the UI.
What is financial modelling?
Financial modelling is the process of creating a summary of a company’s financial performance to forecast future outcomes. By combining historical data with an understanding of market and environmental factors, analysts make assumptions about future performance by looking at metrics such such as revenue growth, expenses, and capital investments.
My Contributions
UX/UI Design, UX Strategy, Information Architecture, UX Research
Revamp Strategy
This project was a massive undertaking, just the UX Team involvement alone spanned four years from project brief to the final launch of the renovated product. It was essential to break it down into smaller parts that we could focus on, one year at a time.
We opted for a sort of hamburger approach, where we began with the Setup and Submission workflows, then used that as a foundation to build out the more complex parts of the tool.
UX Research
Getting to know end users can be challenging, especially in large organizations. We were fortunate that as an internal product our team worked closely with the support team as well as a group of analysts who were eager to help us untangle any weeds we found along the way.
User personas, day in the life documents, and many interviews as the project progressed help us better understand how the tool would be used on a daily basis by our users.
User Workflows
Documenting workflows was an essential part of this project, I needed to capture both the “current state” and the new workflows. This served as an important collaboration tool during our working sessions, and as a reference to ensure that all our teams were working towards the same goal asynchronously.
Modular Design
Once we had the full lifecycle of the product mapped, we were able to identify what areas made sense to revamp that would optimize our own workflows within the project. The first module that we redesigned were the Setup and Submission workflows. While these are used less frequently than their counterparts, they held all the necessary complexity that would set the foundation for all following modules.
Setup Wizard
Initiation, or creating a new model, is not really part of a typical day for an analyst. But getting it right the first time sets them up for success as they often maintain the file over decades in their career. The Setup Wizard guides users through the necessary steps to set up a new file in Excel.
Workflow Optimization
We were able to streamline the required steps for setup, which allowed the entire module performance to increase by 40% for our users.
Tagging Editor
There are over 10k tags available for users to apply when adding new data to their financial models. The Tagging Editor enabled users from over 40 countries to collaborate on files by using the same tagging architecture consistently.
Our team spent countless hours reviewing use cases to better understand a typical user’s prioritization as they worked through this non-linear workflow. We chose to simplify the layout to reduce loading time, which was a significant pain point discovered in our UX Research.
Workbench
Workbench, the essential dashboard that enables users to validate their work and correct errors before publication. This is the only model where we weren’t necessarily striving for simplicity. The primary use case for this part of the tool was accessing a status report that enabled error validation.
Our refurbished version introduced dynamic error handling that guided users through troubleshooting procedures.
UI Design
This project was simply too big for just one designer. I worked closely with a UI Designer from the very beginning of the project in the planning stages, all the way to final implementation and QA testing.
As with all great journeys, we hit a bump in the road
Halfway to project completion, our team was informed that another department had initiated a change in their tech stack, which unfortunately would impact our project significantly. We had to switch our UI library. Not a few components, the entire design system.
Fortunately our design process made this transition as smooth as it could be. We were able to reference the wireframes to ensure that critical capabilities would be supported with the new library components. After a couple long days of pixel pushing we managed to style the new library to match the modules we had already published years prior.
Not with a bang but…
Management opted for a gradual release cycle, which meant we updated the modules as they were designed and developed. While this meant there wasn’t an opportunity for a grand relaunch party, it did allow us to learn from our users directly as the tool evolved.