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Project context | Solution | Reflection

Axioma is a global financial software company. Their core product, Portfolio Management, is a series of proprietary algorithms plugged into investment banks' systems.

For example, suppose a portfolio manager wants better insight into a set of technology stocks. In that case, they have to work with a quantitative analyst to run many test cases, wait about a day to get the perfect test, and ultimately hope it is the best solution for the client.

Portfolio managers cannot run these tests on their own or experiment with portfolios. My mission was to find new and innovative ways of empowering portfolio managers to solve problems for their clients.

My role

I was the Design Lead for Portfolio Analyzer. The team included a visual designer, a product strategist, and a project manager.

Power to the portfolio manager

I led global research with portfolio managers to understand the many inputs portfolio managers consider when constructing a portfolio. I learned that experimentation is a key factor in their portfolio analysis. With this understanding, I defined a framework for portfolio managers:

• A portfolio manager should be able to bring together portfolio, constraint & analytics data and receive multiple portfolio variations.

• Compliance and regulation problems must be caught early and easily corrected within the platform.

• Axioma must be embedded into the day-to-day portfolio management workflow with a seamless interface.

Axioma has built industry-standard software and algorithms for over 18 years. The Portfolio Analyzer tool is the first product to be designed with a user-facing front end. We needed to ensure the product we developed was scaleable across all of Axioma's offerings. This included building interaction patterns from the ground up.

Humanizing Axioma's products meant using natural language descriptions of user actions. This created a positive feedback loop, ensuring users got what they expected from the system. Above are two examples of how I took complex rules and portfolio results and transformed them into easily-digestible sentences.

Bringing simplicity to a complex process

To build a simple, unified experience, my team and I needed to wrap our heads around understanding the landscape of portfolio analysis. Some of the research activities I spearheaded included:

• Axioma stakeholder workshops

• Contextual research with users across the USA and Sweden

• Rapid sketching and prototyping

• User journeys and storyboards

• Persona creation and validation

• Qualitative and quantitative surveys with varied user types

Personas

From the research with portfolio managers, I created a set of personas that reflected our potential users' personalities, experiences, and needs.

Style tiles

My team also created a unified, usable UI to represent the brand best. We decided to use style tiles, a set of components that gives the client an idea of the look and feel for two different design directions.

Consistent

We designed with the principles mentioned in the kick-off with Axioma, such as "Airy white space". As a starting point, we worked closely within the current website guidelines and took references from existing materials.

Progressive

We looked to retain the base foundations of the Axioma brand and introduce relevant styles and characteristics to the application. We reinforced this direction using the results of the previous collaborative design workshops run with the team.

Axioma Portfolio Analyzer represents an end-to-end process of understanding a problem through research, playing back the understanding and building alignment, and then building a product from this solid foundation to meet human needs.

The focus on human-centered problems, combined with Axioma's business strategy, led to a sea-change in design thinking in Axioma, which was used to inform work across many more products within the business.