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
Overview:
Portfolio management tools can be an asset for traders, salespeople, and clients. However, these tools can often be difficult to use, particularly for clients.
For this study, salespeople found that they were spending more time on the portfolio management website helping clients create portfolios rather than actually on the phone with clients pitching them new investments. Our final insights sought to create an experience that was more user friendly for clients, and less time consuming for sales.
Problem:
The 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.
The tool was initially created to help clients manage their portfolios, and to enable sales to have higher control over client portfolios. However, with clients not having full entitlement to the tool and a lack of understanding around how the tool works, clients were often putting in requests through sales to execute changes to their portfolios. 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?
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
First, I took some time to meet with stakeholders to understand their concerns. They did not want to burden clients with taking time out of their day to sit down with UX and talk through the Portfolio Management Tool.
Secondly, they weren’t exactly sure how to approach any changes to the tool, and wanted a larger overhaul of a suite of tools related to portfolio management across traders, strategies, salespeople, and clients.
How I managed this conversation:
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.
I worked with them to narrow the scope to focus more specifically on the experience of clients and salespeople on the Portfolio Management Tool.
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
Analyze and synthesize the data across the various research methods
Deliver insights and final report
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 - creating an experience that is actionable with reasonable timelines for development
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 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 various analyses 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
Clients
Want to be able to conduct their own stress tests, and to reduce the 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
03 - Recommendations and Next Steps
Strategic:
Start looking across the suite of tools involved in this workflow to conduct research, as the suite of tools that exist would be more effective if they functioned as an ecosystem
Create personas across the tools and user journeys to understand the various touchpoints and bottlenecks
Tactical:
Make usability improvements based on feedback from clients and sales
Start developing some designs for concept testing and feedback
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:
Product roadmap was developed, with a mix of larger redesign changes and smaller tactical fixes
This research also will inform research efforts into other tools in the portfolio management workflow
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 - Reflection
This project was a major undertaking for me, with months of planning and stakeholder meetings informing a lot of the direction. Some key learnings I had were:
Compromising in Research
As a researcher, being an advocate can be challenging in a space where stakeholders don’t understand the value of your work. As someone who has historically worked in spaces where I was able to conduct really extensive, niche research that I always had buy-in for, I struggled with trying to get buy-in for the research I wanted to conduct for this tool. Learning to meet these stakeholders in the middle and finding a compromise that we were both happy with helped me get at least some research done, which helped with better buy-in for later phases of work.
The importance of accountability
This project involved collaboration across myself, various stakeholders across business, product and tech, and UX Designers. At times, there was confusion around who was responsible for what work, whose approvals were needed, and what the timelines were across various tracts of work. This could have been easily resolved with aligning on a RACI (responsibility, accountability, consulted, informed) matrix from the start, and is something I hope to implement in other projects moving forward.