Tax-Smart Investment Strategy App
The product that helps financial advisors in improving their efficiency and effectiveness
Client: Asset & Wealth Management of the largest bank
Role: Product Designer
Project details:
Design solutions to empower advisors through breaking down barriers to financial progress, improving client outcomes, and growing their practice through client experience. Solutions are achieved through a user-centered approach. The well thought-out process helped us in gaining and improving business outcomes in big numbers.
Contribution:
Understanding and gathering the requirements, User Research, Design workshops, Userflows, Ideation, Low-to-Mid-to-High Fidelity Wireframes, Comps, Interactive Prototypes, A/B Testing, Usability Testing, Design Documentation, Development Hand-off, and Design QA.
Tools used:
Figma, FigJam, Salesforce Cloud, Adobe CC, Authenticator, VDI, Skype, MS Teams, MS Excel, SharePoint, Jira, Asana, Zoom, and Symphony
The Challenge
To understand the business strategy and empathize with end clients. A fast-paced work environment with a hi-fi tax-smart investment strategy engine.
Challenge Accepted
Deep dive to understand what and how the tax-smart investment strategy engine is helping the clients to achieve their financial goals. Familiarize with industry-standard vocabulary and acronyms to understand the business and empathize with the users.
Approach
Deep dive into tax-smart investments strategies, asset management, and private banking sectors to deeply understand the business and its users. It helped me to articulate the various problems and user needs, create better designs, and improve the experience and usability of the product.
How I helped
Worked closely with Chief Product Officer and received constructive feedback in improving the experience of the various critical segments of the business
Collaborated with C-level Executives, product owners, product managers, Sales, Marketing, Trade-ops, and development teams in large distributed time zones.
Helped team members with brainstorming and design critiques
Helped various stakeholders in achieving their goals through brainstorming and providing well-thought-out design solutions
Contributed to the design system and in establishing the design language of the product
Experience working with third-party design agencies in designing the marketing website and rebranding.
By designing a brand-new product with a completely new look and feel with rich features.
I helped the development team from the design side in converting the coding from JavaScript to React.
Documenting the business rules clearly for the development team to code and helped through design Q&A while moving the code from staging to production.
Restriction Expansion
Restriction Expansion is a product that allows users to restrict sectors, individual securities, and industries to be bought into the portfolio. I provided a scalable solution to the issue that helps it to grow with the changing needs. I designed the experience of the product by gathering requirements from and interviewing CPO. I did research, ideated, and reviewed it with the chief product officer to confirm that the story telling helps users. Following the process, I iterated the designs and performed usability testing with stakeholders and cross-functional teams. I worked with third-party designers to understand the current and rebranding guidelines to deliver the mockups quickly.
Portal Web-To-Case Form
I designed a form and a trigger to activate the form. This form helps externals and internals who signed into the Advisor Portal to raise a support ticket or inquiry about cash management, account management, trade, and any technical-related issues. I designed this SalesForce-related form, performed usability testing with the stakeholders, and handed it over to the dev. I supported the development team from the design side in integrating this SalesForce form into the Advisor Portal.
Fully-Transitioned Tax Transition Portfolio
Fully-Transitioned TT screen is an edge-case scenario. I redesigned this to help users by telling a story behind the situation, using real numbers, meaningful labels, and a detailed explanation. I collaborated with cross-functional teams to understand how the advisors explain the attributes to the end clients. It helped me to prioritize the data points and tell the story.
Model Management Utility
Model Management Utility is a product that helps internals and externals to bring, edit, assign, and manage models within the portal. I worked on this product from end-to-end, gathering requirements to design the experiences to dev hands-off to design QA. I worked on the list views of the models and advanced filters by setting up a new design style. The design style and components I created for the product helped our design team in redesigning other pieces throughout the portal.
Tax Transition Screen
Tax Transition screen is the heart of the product that helps users in choosing the correct transition scenario of the model. I helped users by giving them an opportunity to compare various attributes along the the percentage weights of the portfolio. I interviewed stakeholders to understand the prominence of the data points that helps users in making decisions. User stories helped me to bring empathy and focus more on the users in designing the cards. Performing user testing with stake holders and other team members helped me to find the need for the improvements. Handed over to the development team and did design QA using the lower environments to make sure the screen was coded as per the specifications and business rules provided.
Tax Savings Report
The Tax Savings report is the crucial communication point with the end clients and the advisors. I helped users of various demographics by understanding their accounts, tax savings, and the benefits that are delivered. I tried to explain what it would have been if they did not take tax management with us and how they are getting benefitted by going with us. I collaborated with Sales, Marketing, Compliance, Trade-Operations, and Technology teams to understand what information is more valuable to the end clients.
Retrospective
I enjoyed learning about breaking down barriers to financial progress using a tax-smart investment strategy engine. Proud to be owning the core user experience for a tax-transition management software solution, helping grow assets from $6B to $12B+. The supported coordinated rollout of tax-managed products partnering with compliance, sales, marketing, operations, and products, ensuring solutions work for all stakeholders. I excelled in my skills in Figma by creating and reusing components, applying auto layouts, rapid prototyping, and using FigJam for whiteboarding sessions. I learned Asana and Symphony as part of my day-to-day tasks. I gained experience in how startups work and obtained a chance to work with leaders, watching them closely.