Portfolio Management Tool

Discovery Research

This project represents real work that is shielded by NDAs. Any identifiable information has been removed, but problems, methodologies, and insights have remain unchanged.

Responsibilities:

Research Planning

Stakeholder Management

User Interviews

Analysis and Synthesis

Role:

UX Research Lead

Timeline:

8 weeks

Tools:

Figma

Optimal Workshop

Problem:

Portfolio management tools can be an asset for traders, salespeople, and clients. However, the available portfolio management tool did not offer enough functionality to clients to be able to create and execute strategies in their own portfolios, creating a larger burden on sales. Rather than being on the phone selling to clients, salespeople were forced to spend more time on the portfolio management tool website.

Goals:

We wanted to understand:

  • How are clients currently using the tool? And what is missing from that experience that would allow them to work autonomously?

  • How are salespeople currently using the tool?

  • What is the ideal experience for salespeople, and what are their goals around portfolio management?

  • How can we streamline this process across two user groups?

01 - Stakeholder Management

Stakeholders did not want to speak with real clients, and did not have a narrow enough scope on this project

  1. I validated the concerns of the stakeholders, and explained to them the value of getting real opinions from clients. This entailed a presentation around the business value of UX, a field that was still new to many of the stakeholders. We then compromised on a brief survey for clients, with questions created alongside client support managers who had a deeper knowledge of client complaints with the tool.

  2. I worked with our business partners to narrow the scope, focusing more specifically on the experience of clients and salespeople on the Portfolio Management Tool, with the hopes that successful research on this tool would lead to being able to complete more research on the wider suite of tools.

02 - Research Process

Research Planning and Scoping

After working with stakeholders, we outlined that we would:

  • Conduct stakeholder interviews across business, product and tech partners to understand the problem space and any additional perspectives that could be helpful

  • Conduct user interviews with salespeople to understand their experience with the Portfolio Management Tool

  • Create and distribute a survey to clients to get feedback on how they believe the tool could be improved to allow them more autonomy

  • Analyze the data and synthesize into tangible themes and insights

  • Deliver insights with actionable design and development recommendations

Stakeholder Interviews

After conducting stakeholder interviews across 5 major stakeholders, we determined:

  • Business objectives - making sure we utilize employee time for gaining new clients and retaining existing clients

  • Product objectives - starting the process of developing a product roadmap for this tool, and come away with a list of priorities

  • Tech objectives - not building an entirely new system, but trying to find ways to improve existing platforms to ensure reasonable development times with the available resources

User Interviews

In interviews, we conducted 7 30-minute sessions with salespeople, to understand:

  • Their current role, and how they utilize the portfolio management tool

  • What their goals are for portfolio management and how that ties into client relationships

  • What their pain points are, and how they impact what they need to accomplish

  • What other tools they use and how they’re interacting with clients and other employees

  • Their perspective on how clients use the tool, and how they would want to use the tool

Client Survey

For the survey, we mainly focused our questions around:

  • How clients currently use this tool

  • Their current pain points with the tool

  • How they want the tool to function

  • Their overarching goals in creating portfolios

Analysis and Synthesis

*No actual data has been shown here due to the NDA currently in place, but the structure of data synthesis has been represented

For analysis, I went through all of the interviews again and began coding all of the data, with colored sticky notes representing each interviewee, and themes grouped based on the research objectives. In the analysis process I also:

  • Conducted a debrief session with stakeholders, who attended some of the interviews, to understand their perspective and socialize some of the findings

  • Met with the designers to work on recommendations and next steps in line with their objectives

  • Began to distill the findings into a larger report, with an executive summary for high level executive stakeholders

Findings

Salespeople

  • Want clients to have more control over creating portfolios, including more control over some specific types of analyses to be able to stress test their proposed strategies

  • Need more access to certain analyses and exposures for themselves, as they currently have to go back and forth with quantitative analysts to fulfill certain client requests

  • Wanted some streamlined tactical fixes to make their actual workflows easier and faster

Clients

  • Want to be able to conduct their own stress tests, as they currently feel frustrated by the amount of time it takes sales to get back to them with various analyses

  • A better onboarding experience, as they find the website confusing to navigate

  • More access to their salesperson’s time

  • A couple clients also noted that they are fine with how things work now, and would just like things to move a bit faster

03 - Recommendations and Next Steps

Tactical:

  • Start laying out the foundation for a testing ground for clients to be able to access basic analytics tools within the existing platform

  • Get feedback on potential concepts from sales, for both what the client access would look like and their own access

  • Make usability improvements based on feedback from clients and sales - i.e. better navigation, better search

Strategic:

  • Start looking across the suite of tools involved in this workflow to conduct research to see how other tools could be improved in service of some of the goals and pain points that were mentioned by sales and clients

  • Create personas across the tools and user journeys to understand the various touchpoints and bottlenecks

Because this tool exists within a larger suite of tools, the next steps outlined will be to follow through on the feedback from users, while also conducting more discovery work on the other tools within the workflow.

04 - Research Impact

Strategic Impact:

  • This research will inform research efforts into other tools in the portfolio management workflow, contributing to the creation of a more efficient portfolio management ecosystem

Stakeholder Impact:

  • Stakeholders were engaged with the work, and are now more invested in continuing research through the product lifecycle for this tool

Product Impact:

  • Developed and communicated important insights regarding the pain points and goals of users to understand how the tool should progress

  • Prioritized what features are most important, and how the product roadmap should be built out

05 - Lessons Learned

  1. Compromising in Research to ensure the comfort of stakeholders, prove the value of research, and lay the foundation for future research efforts

  2. The importance of accountability in projects with multiple partners to ensure that all work is assigned and accounted for with clear deadlines to ensure efficient delivery.

Next

Trader Workflow Optimization