Problem Space

As a design lead for the Bank of America Merrill Investment Advisory team, one of the most common problem spaces I work within is the communication between advisors and their clients. As advised clients, our end users rely on their advisors to manage their investments properly and trust that their advisor is constantly communicating important updates, and opportunities in a timely manner. Most of this happens at the advisors discretion throughout the year. However, there is one legally mandated process that happens every year that is the most contentious at the bank. This is the annual review.

At the time, the process was largely left up to each advisor to handle independently. The only documentation and support provided by the bank was a paper report mailed out to clients after the review process was complete.

User Research

As part of a funded project, I worked with the research team to go out into the field and speak with our advisors and clients. In total, we spoke with 12 Advisors and 9 investment advisory clients. In addition we also held a focus group with clients facilitated by an independent agency. I attended all the sessions. At the time I was pretty new to investing in general. It was a great opportunity to learn the space. Here’s what we learned.

It’s important to mention that the clients we’re targeting in this problem space are those that have a working knowledge of investing, but don’t consider themselves experts. Our expert investors are typically much more involved in the details of their portfolio and already have a good pulse on their holdings.

Our Stakeholders 

We also held several sessions with our internal partners to learn about their goals for the product. They walked us through a lot of the collateral and materials that were used in the previous process. Based on the information gathered from these sessions, we had a firm understanding of our requirements.

Concepts & Sketches

Once I’d gathered inputs from our users and stakeholders, I had a good understanding of the content we’d need in include in the experience and the requirements. Given the problem space, we decided to create an interactive report that could be sent out to clients. I started sketching out the initial experience. Over the next few weeks I conducted a few sessions with the working group and stakeholders to discuss the initial ideas and determine what success meant for the project.

The team sketched some solutions together and would quickly take prototypes out in the field to validate any assumptions we were making with product features.

Throughout the design process, we were constantly out in the field with customers having them test and interact with the new UI to ensure that we were keeping their day to day in mind as the product took shape.

Final Design