Morningstar Client Dashboard
Work Project
Improve you client management workflows with seamless investment planning integration software and deeper client insights.
Overview
Redesigned the client dashboard for financial advisors to seamlessly integrate investment planning and goal-setting tools, addressing key pain points such as fragmented workflows, limited client visibility, and lack of actionable insights. Through advisor interviews and iterative testing, I developed streamlined dashboard concepts that enhance decision-making, improve efficiency, and provide a more cohesive user experience.
If you're interested in this project, I'd love to walk you through the full case study and design strategy.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Tools
Figma, Adobe AfterEffects
Skills
UI/UX Design, Research, Cross-team Collaboration
Challenges
One of the biggest hurdles in this project was finding and engaging advisors for user research. Our team didn’t have a dedicated list of advisors who were regularly contacted for feedback, making recruitment difficult. I personally reached out to over 120 advisors, receiving responses from only 10, and out of those, 3 canceled without rescheduling.
To overcome this, I had to work beyond my immediate team, collaborating with CSMs and the marketing team to identify advisors who were more open to participating in research. This extra effort was crucial in securing valuable insights to drive our design decisions.
This extended the timeline by a few weeks. However, the spacing of the interviews and the insights advisors provided allowed me to refine and reprioritize the questions, ensuring we addressed any gaps or ambiguities.
Opportunities
This main challenge highlighted the need for a structured, ongoing research approach. As a result:
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I helped spearhead the creation of a go-to list of advisors willing to provide feedback regularly.
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Our team developed a centralized system to store interview recordings, research findings, and feedback, ensuring accessibility across interconnected workflows.
Design Concepts
Collaborating with my teammate, we explored two design approaches: a performance-driven dashboard and a goal-focused dashboard. I focused on the performance and insights aspect, iterating on ways to highlight top-performing and underperforming portfolios, showcase holdings performance, surface risk indicators, and reduce manual work—such as streamlining research for holdings.
We needed to ensure that our design maintained all existing dashboard interactions, including creating portfolios and goals, initiating risk tolerance questionnaires and investor preference surveys, and accessing portfolio details for planning. Additionally, leadership requested new features, such as top holdings insights and other data enhancements. The challenge at this stage was balancing the extensive data while crafting a clear and intuitive user narrative.
Taking the feedback from advisors into account, I mocked up ideas that featured:
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A top-level health check summarizing client status.
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A fund filtering tool to flag under-review investments and suggest alternatives.
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10-year growth visualization with client contributions overlay.
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Reorganized layout to surface the most relevant insights quickly.
Validating Designs & Uncovering New Opportunities
After gathering initial feedback from advisors and developing mockups, we conducted a second round of interviews—this time including both new advisors and the original three. It was particularly insightful to reconnect with the initial advisors, as our first designs were shaped directly by their input. They were eager to validate whether our solutions aligned with their needs and improved their workflows. Their feedback surfaced considerations we hadn’t initially accounted for, as well as opportunities for refinement. A key takeaway was that expanding integration partners could significantly accelerate their processes while delivering more actionable insights.
Meeting with Key Stakeholders
Following these conversations, I presented our findings to leadership, aligning next steps with our priority list. The proposed design directions aim to:
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Improve efficiency by reducing manual calculations.
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Provide clearer investment insights with comparative fund analysis.
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Enable faster decision-making with a summarized client view.
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Enhance user experience through customization and data visualization.
Current Difficulties
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Advisors had to manually compile data to get a full picture of their clients.
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Portfolio performance insights were scattered across multiple pages.
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No quick way to filter out under-review or problematic funds and suggest alternatives.
Key Needs
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A summarized client view with total AUM, top holdings, and account breakdowns.
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A fund filtering tool to flag under-review investments and suggest alternatives.
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10-year growth visualization with client contributions overlay.
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A customizable dashboard to fit different advisor workflows.
Integrating Intelligent Notifications
As the design continues to evolve, I am gathering ongoing advisor feedback to refine interactions and usability, enhancing data visualization for more intuitive decision-making, and validating how well the dashboard adapts to different advisor workflows.
Additionally, I am collaborating with a designer on intelligent notifications within the product. Advisor feedback reinforced the value of this feature, confirming the need for more AI-driven insights. While we can’t implement all requested AI features immediately, we are starting with actionable insights as a foundation for future enhancements.
Quantitative Research
We met with a wide range of financial advisors. Each one having a different approach to planning based on their firm, the tools they used, and/or years of experience. In order to get a comprehensive look into the minds of a financial advisor, we created 5-7 questions (with some overlap) to fit in each of the categories below:
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Understanding Motivations & Needs
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Navigating Between Different Data Points
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Display & Data Presentation
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Validation & Assumptions