Advisory Dashboard is a global internal reporting tool containing aggregated data from various datasources used by relationship managers, investment consultants and sales support to track client suitability topics and tasks.
Modules, functionalities and (downloadable) reports have been added over time to what began as an interim solution in 2009 (Version 1).
As a result, the tool experienced performance and usability issues, an increase in bugs, inquiries, and support emails, as well as an increase in tool downtime.
When our team took over ownership of the tool in 2017, we had to decide whether to keep the existing tool and fix whatever we could or to completely rebuild it from the ground up. After only a few days of reverse engineering, code analysis, and some user interviews, we decided to reinvent the tool.
The general project definition was rather straightforward and included the following components:
Because version 1 of the dashboard was already in use, our team was also aware of our users' main objectives:
Research activities were divided into three parts with the goal of understanding user behavior, defining user personas/profiles and identifying main pain points:
Pain points
Typical user journey (simplified)
Very quickly, it became clear that we needed to simplify things here. With so many connections and subpages (in some cases, direct access to files on sub-sub pages), the navigation was far too complicated. We were able to greatly reduce the information architecture by simply keeping the important (and often used) content. See below to compare old (left) and new (right) setup:
Sketches
Some examples of numerous sketches to find a solution…
to be added soon.
Throughout the project, our team (including myself) learned a lot. The following are the most significant takeaways/learnings:
Following the UX process is beneficial in theory, but it can vary in practice. For example, users may not have time for testing, there may not be enough time for certain iterations, or the budget may be limited.
Take the time to determine which features are required and which are not. According to our research, many of the features of Advisory Dashboard version 1 were never used.
When modifying known elements and workflows, exercise caution. Even if the new solution is much easier to use, there will always be users who dislike change.
All trademarks, names, logos, icons used in this project ('Advisory Dashboard') are proprietary to Credit Suisse AG. Figures are fictitious and for illustrative purposes only.