Dashboard UX to Business UI

How I approached designing a wealth management dashboard for the world’s biggest wealth manager

Designing for the everyday

Within a strictly regulated wealth management environment my client use dashboards on other applications every day. As the world’s largest wealth manager there is a complete commitment to digital banking and to streamline efficiencies to what was rapidly becoming the banks ‘hero’ application.

As principal user groups, the Customer Executives and Customer Executive Assistants (CE’s/CEA’s) deliver to HNW individuals financial advice, quotes and investment strategies via a desktop application and an iPad Pro App. Accessing strictly confidential data to provide a complete, competitive and professional service, tailored for every meeting.

Dashboard development driving factors

There are clear persuasive qualities for building a dashboard; as a one-stop-shop that provides a quick-view of the various necessities to facilitate a client meeting, user-flow improvement and more importantly functionality. But I needed to factor down, and focused on 3 ‘must-haves’ for our dashboard:

1. Single point of access for disparate data
Instead of opening various applications, interfaces, or online databases, the CE’s/CEA’s has a real-time dashboard at their disposal.

2. Broad overview with drill down capabilities
This dashboard is a dynamic collection of account numbers, text, and graphical elements arranged with the inverted triangle principal front of mind.

3. Easier, faster, single source of truth 
A well designed information dashboard takes numbers, textual information and meeting status colours — and places them both intelligently and hierarchically for quick consumption.

Real world requirement gathering

Users do drive requirements, but in business there is a controlling factor; funding. A driving factor from a stakeholder perspective was better integration for the ‘Create a Meeting’ experience – especially when ‘Adding account numbers’. Crucially, there was funding to do this.

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How to approach the design process

Step 1 – Start with the user needs

What is the user trying to achieve? Keep the UX simple. Priority was streamlining the preparation of a meeting, and future proofing the ‘Create a Meeting’ process with a scalable UI to accommodate multiple repositories.

Step 2 – Segment the experience in to ‘zones’

Operating within a tired system in order to offer a hierarchical ‘best practice’ solution. The on-screen real estate delivers out a quick-look experience prioritising from top to bottom.

Step 3 – Test and Challenge through Prototyping 

Visualising what could be up to 12 users’ journeys, with so many moving parts was both confusing and problematic. The client needed clarification, the perfect opportunity for prototyping. Developers also need re-assurance that this would be a boxed development and would not impact other working code.

Communicate Concepts and ‘sell your idea’

Validate any assumptions

Quick sketches provided ‘early eyes’ on what my proposal. Although not finalised, they are quick, cheap and can be easily changed and provide valuable insight for the development team to feedback with point estimates.

This extra data also fed into our decision-making process, as feasibility, cost and effort were also key considerations.

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Sketching; The first line of attack to crack a design problem

A Prioritise, Elaborate and Tailored Experience

Focusing on what is in scope, these initial sketches start to show the power of a dashboard. Pushing a hierarchical arrangement, the user’s eyes organically focus from top to bottom, left to right. As we have the data we should embrace the Meeting Name and group the Associated Account Numbers (BR), the Meeting Status and lastly the Meeting Date – four priorities when creating a meeting.

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Providing a multi layered, multi functional approach

One key factor on the development (and acceptance) of this new radical design was the ‘achievability factor’. As mentioned early, funding in a key developmental point with financial services, without it a project will not leave the ground. User Experience is not funded and we UX professions can argue until the cows come home that it should – but designing with business realities is a key skill UX professionals need. 

Drilling down on the details of account number association

The driving forces behind the implementation of a new dashboard was sold into the business as streamlining the ‘Create a Meeting’ user flow. Highlighting, at a single glance, all the metrics that contribute to an improved and more valuable meeting for the bank’s customers. This deal breaker was surfacing multiple associated account numbers. Hover state and pop-over dialog box played an important part here.

A full suite of functionality, all there front-of-stall for the user

Realising the final solution

The final solution is was a triumph. It both solved the scalability problem providing easy access to account numbers, the ability to add other numbers, visibility on the meeting date and time, the meeting status and the meeting organiser, all there in front of the user. 

Dashboard Design for customer meetings

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