A modern way to manage fixed income asset portfolios.
(Speculative design exercise)
The goal of the exercise was to improve upon an existing web application that automatically creates an investment portfolio with bonds that meet predetermined criteria.
Project Info:
Speculative exercise - 2 Days
UI Design, UX Design optimization
Scorable/Bond IT as an organization enables fixed income asset managers to create investment portfolios. Asset managers (such as banks, or individuals) manage investments on behalf of their clients. Their role consists of determining what investments to make, or avoid, and creating portfolios that balance risk and profit. When setting up a portfolio, they need to control which financial products (e.g. stocks, or bonds) out of thousands of options to include, and in which quantities. “Constraints" allow these users to define parameters that include or exclude certain bonds from the generated portfolio, and limit their allocations.
The Wireframe (Given)
This wireframe was received as part of the design exercise and the solution was to be built upon this existing wireframe. After a few interactions with the stakeholders, a better understanding of the "Constrains" was developed which helped me build the Hi-fi prototype.
User interaction flow
A user interaction flow was made to understand how the user will interact on the website and particularly the constraints page. This flow helped to understand interaction complexities within the page and what all points the user needed to make a decision. This in turn helped to articulate the flow of the page and resolve any issues that may arise from the interaction.
The Prototype
The central idea of the exercise revolved around creating an elegant UI that, without cognitive load, enables the users to configure the portfolio. Clear identification of the type of assets, the percentage of the assets to be included and deselecting the assets was the goal for the individual cards. Enabling the users to select/deselect all the assets at a glance and configure the inclusivity percentage was also a requested feature as often times, the amount of assets in a category may be large enough that the user might have to go individually over the category and select/deselect them.
As learned from the user interaction flow, the summary is the most important feature of the page as it gives an overview of the selections. And hence, it is designed to be a drawer that gives the user a focussed overview of the selected items.
By introducing a clean UI, a clear interaction hierarchy, simple asset cards, and focussed summary, we can enable the users to focus on the assets to be included in the portfolio.
It was a very interesting exercise as the problems to be solved were tricky and may lead to further confusion for the users. With the time constrains and limited knowledge of the product, only a local solution could be achieved. However, with time and a deeper understanding, one could dig deeper into the problem and solve them globally within the product.
Feel free to get back to me if you have any queries or any feedback. I would love to learn your perspective and how you may approach a similar problem.
You can also access the prototype with this link. It will give you a better understanding of how the page was made for developer handover.