envestnet
Solutions built to save time and money
My role
I spent more than a year working on a complete redesign of the company's 20-year-old legacy core application, which is used by accountants and market data researchers. My role involved building, planning, and refining workflows to improve speed and efficiency for these power users, whose main job is reconciling financial data as well as managing and maintaining investor accounts and the health of securities information.
Services
UX, UI, Strategy, Visual Design
Categories
Fintech | Accounting Software | B2B
Impact
Cut down 50% on the design and development time
Translated complex business requirements into easy-to-accomplish intuitive solutions.
Built a compelling story around the design solution, helping the team understand and communicate it to others.
Problem
- Users didn’t have a way to easily enter multiple fields in the advanced search without having to re-enter them each time.
- Users didn’t want to lose their field selections when returning to the page.
Solution
To solve these problems, we developed a “save to search favorites” feature that allows users to save their searches to favorites, manage multiple saved searches, and navigate between pages without worrying about losing their search criteria.
Design
Proccess
Analysis
- I defined the problems and challenges as the first step to gain focus and understand what we were trying to solve.
- I researched what other teams were doing in terms of design and explored or implemented similar solutions.
- I collaborated with other teams to research if they had developed a similar “save to search favorites” feature and how they managed saving searches on their platforms.”
Findings
- Other teams had built similar features that save user searches, but approached it differently by using an additional slide panel to manage and create layouts.
- I discovered that different teams had different definitions of how the user-saved search criteria should be defined.
This feedback from the team helped me move on to the next step.
Definition
After gaining enough insight into what other designers had built, I created a mapping of those experiences and their definitions. For example, some designers saved user searches using “saved layouts.”
This definition was necessary in order to communicate to my team what others had built and what we could potentially reuse or create our own definition for.
Team collaboration
- I scheduled meetings with my product teams to share the findings from the previous step and follow up with designers on other teams.
- We determined that other teams’ solutions using multiple slide panels was too much functionality and not necessary for our needs.
- I presented multiple potential design options to my product team that used our existing functionality and incorporated the “save search to favorites” feature within the advanced search panel. We collaborated on these ideas.
- Ultimately, we gained alignment on the MVP approach of using a simple and easy-to-accomplish solution that utilized the existing advanced search panel, reducing complexity and design time in development.
Execution
- I translated our decisions into design goals to help communicate them to other teams and focused on the next design iteration to incorporate a solution within the advanced search panel.
- To streamline the experience even further, I wanted to make it easy for users to save their searches to favorites by having the system remember their most recent search. If users wanted to be more intentional about saving their search and giving it a name, they could do so using a dropdown within the advanced search.
- It took a few more iterations to discuss open items, such as how the auto-save feature would work and how manually saved searches would be handled. We ended with a finalized solution that both the dev teams and the product team felt comfortable moving forward with.
Outcome
- We implemented a simple design using a dropdown to save searches to favorites, which later became an out-of-the-box UX pattern added to the design system by the GateKeeper.
- Dev team was able to demo the solution we had all agreed upon within just one sprint
- Both the product team and dev teams were aligned with the new experience.
- Users seemed to find the feature useful, as we received positive feedback during our weekly meetings with them.
- During these meetings, we also received questions about how the auto-save preset for saved searches worked.
Next steps
- I addressed some of the open questions and feedback by writing annotations to make it clear for dev and the team to understand and access. This helped to ensure that all stakeholders had a clear understanding of the feedback and how it was being addressed.
- We allowed users to work with the feature in a UAT environment so we could gather real-time feedback and discuss it in our next meeting.
