What?
Web application to manage customers’ accounts, license and applications that transfer financial data
Client
London Stock Exchange (LSEG)
For whom?
Big banks (UBS, Wells Fargo, etc.)
My contributions
As a Product Designer, I became a part of internal team for almost 3 years, to help maintain, support, evolve and remake the web application. Also hiring and mentoring new teammates.
Part 1 - Managing Unmanagable
The Wrecked Flow
When I came to the project the established design workflow was poor. The design were perceived as “picture-making for developers’ convenience”, but not building the experience of quality.
Design was optional, more like a tool for BA to explain their ideas to developers
It made a snowball of bad design bigger. So after long time chasing senior management, I was able to change the development flow.
After the changes the design had to be signed off by design team and BA/PM and Dev PM
Design became the centre of the process
Checking and Reporting
The tasks were incoming gradually, and there were no control of the progress. First, I started an Excel file, sharing it with the team.
And after a while after my request we got a Jira space for our team. It became more handy and more visible for our peers and stakeholders.
Part 2 - far from home
When I joined, the starting screen looked like this:
Original starting page of Platform Amdinistration
Debriefing
Understanding what’s going on here was tough. Both for internal team, and especially for users, who had to rely on pdf-manual with text and screenshots.
The argumentation from managers were: “Only professionals use our applications, they don’t need a clear design”.
Which is, of course, always wrong, and further feedback and research through the years confirmed it.
I had also figured out that most clients used small laptops with low screen resolution, and regularly used zoomed in interfaces.
So the header appeared massive and took almost half of the screen, which was not convenient.
Finally Home
After long time of debates, our design team managed to create a Home Page. It was much simpler than we expected, as we were limited by back-end capabilities.
Now user were asked once at the beginning about their location, and was landing in the correct location in all the next sessions.
Home Page of Platform Administration
The North Star
Working at the project for years, I was noting the flaws and started making concepts of how Platform Admin could look if we had all the recourses.
My concepts often became the North Star for improvements and the stakeholders liked them, but they were too far to reach fast, with blocks on design and development.
My concept for the Home page of Platform Admin
The header now takes one row.
Name of the Account, account location, address and number are always visible.
The notification center, search and profile menu were the long-awaited absent features, that were absent due to lack of resources and lack of design-intervention at the early stages.
Customizable dashboard for Platform Admin
Part 3 - maze of navigation
Inconsistent Build
Platform Admin was like Hogwarts and its Houses. Each section had its own Product Owner. The problem was they didn’t cooperate when building a new feature and often didn’t know what happens in the neighbourhood.
This led to features being all around the app, with no coherence, and missing expectations.
I offered a reorganisation of the features up to user’s expectations.
Initial map of Platform Admin
I have introduced the Dashboard (aka Home Page), simplified and regrouped the similar items.
Account to account, license to license, notification to notification.
Initial map of Platform Admin
Blueprint to Save a Day
Making service blueprint was a big deal for everybody that actually helped to see the gaps on a flat map.
This even led the senior management to the idea of separating some parts of Platform Admin to another app. But it’s a story for another showcase.
Part 4 - Cases
License Chaos
Every User or Service Account might have had licences in order to have access to databases.
The problem was that once the change is made (license assigned or unassigned), it blocks managing licenses until the status changes from Pending assignment to Assigned.
It could take from 1 hour to a week, and there were no available way to make a prediction or put a timer.
I was pitching the extreme necessity of changing this multiple times, but it was too difficult problem to change in the architecture. So I had to play along.
Note for developers and stakeholders on how the licenses assignment works
This affected other pages. We had to build a cross-notification system that was notifying a user that the license is blocked because of the recent change.
This approach prevented user from manipulating the licenses only to get rejection after sometimes a long time spent on managing the licenses.
License is not available to be unassigned from a user account, because that user account had recent changes in its licenses
My concepts on the license that considered all the described issues
I housed Licenses under one roof, letting switch interface between User Account and Service Account licenses. License Template is also housed under Licenses.
Instead of having 2 heavy tables next to each other, I made a quick filter between all user accounts, the ones with the current license, and one without.
As more clients wanted to supervise the moment of license assignment - it has its own, well-visible section
Service Insight
Service Insight became a part of Platform Admin, because it was cheaper than making a stand-alone app for it.
Client’s who used Service Insight were different from the clients who used the rest of the app.
This part had a lot of workaround and were getting bigger without proper research on user’s experience.
My version were more user-friendly based on the user feedback.
Home page of Platform Admin - concept
Showing Service Account status as a table was a simple solution, but complex to overview for the customers.
So I implemented the “dashboard view”option, where they can see the Service Account statuses as active visuals. Table option stays too, by toggle.
