Overview

Orion Wealth Management Portal app is a financial planning app for clients to manage their wealth with 2000+ advisory firms and financial advisors.

After Orion's acquisition of the Advizr(now is Orion Planning) platform, the primary focus was to bring Orion investment data into the desktop experience of our a white-labeled client portal, which our clients (the investment advisors) brand and distribute to their clients. Therefore, there was a new acquisition called for a new mobile app in this project.

The app posses an easy, self accessible and friendly user interface which allows investor manage their wealth on hands with their advisors.

Challenge

The challenge is to provide consistency between desktop and mobile experiences using the newly formed design system giving the product a new , more minimalistic approach and making the interface easier to navigate through while delighting users with a beautiful and pleasant experience compared with the legacy mobile app.

Solution

Migrate to new design system ( Orion Product Language)

• Scan through pages and screens to perform a series of actions

• Lighten the cognitive load  by replacing long sequences of text with short, memorable visual cues

Change from a grid layout to list

• Bigger overall visibility without the need to scroll as much the interface

• Easily view account details

Using icons to indicate different type

• Scan through pages and screens to perform a series of actions

• Lighten the cognitive load  by replacing long sequences of text with short, memorable visual cues

My contribution

User research Usability testing Product design

The team

1 × product manager 1 × product designer 3 × engineers

Year

2020

Research

Agile usability testing

As an agile business, testing our products and their features is one of the most important steps in the app development process. all feedback on the overall user experience, effectiveness, and performance of our apps brings us closer to a successful end-product. When we kicked off the project we initially started off as a team of 3, including 2 Product Designer and product manager, and myself handling the research efforts.

User Interview

We conducted a 2-week usability testing with 6 Registered Investment Advisors (RIA) and 1 Orion internal participant. I moderated 6 remote usability sessions during usability testing where we used our findings to validate the current app design, and then moved forward with suggesting solution/building new features for effective functionality. The goal of the usability testing is to discover user pain points and gain insights related to the overall experience of the mobile app, specifically focused on how users view charts, accounts and details within each account.the research goal and area we’d like to focus.

Key Insights

We got a good spike of traffic and loads of valuable feedback on the product. Through TestFlight research, I identified a few pain points that users were experiencing and categorized the complaints in 4 categories:

Usability - frustrated with no sorting/filtering 

Accessibility-font size and color contrast

Interaction- redundant clicks to view portfolio details

Functionality-lacked much of the functionality available on desktop

Changed based on user's feedback


Conclusion

After two weeks of user research, analysis and redesign, I was able to validate the assumptions and changes I had made. I did this by testing my clickable prototype with seven new users. The results are:

  1. Searching for net value in chart: 7 out of 7 users found it on the home screen in 5 seconds.
  2. Account Details: 7 out of 7 users were able to switch between account view
  3. Looking for Position: 6 out of 7 users were able to find it quickly.
  4. Looking for transaction category: 7out of 7 users found it helpful.

Takeaway

Designing with mobile in mind is very different from designing for web

Through this case study, I learned users behave very differently on their phone compared to the desktop and it can be action focused or less action oriented dependent on the industry you are designing it for.  Touch screens let users have a lot more interaction compared to the web. Mobile app design, on the other hand, essentially falls under the realm of interaction design. This is where the complexity of simplicity hits us harder. Designing for interaction and micro-interactions is complex not only because it requires an understanding of the platform and the user, it has to be made to feel almost invisible. Knowing how people use, hold and interact with their mobile devices will go a long way in helping you design for touch and voice.

Takeaway

Designing with mobile in mind is very different from designing for web

Through this case study, I learned users behave very differently on their phone compared to the desktop and it can be action focused or less action oriented dependent on the industry you are designing it for.  

Touch screens let users have a lot more interaction compared to the web. Mobile app design, on the other hand, essentially falls under the realm of interaction design. This is where the complexity of simplicity hits us harder. Designing for interaction and micro-interactions is complex not only because it requires an understanding of the platform and the user, it has to be made to feel almost invisible. Knowing how people use, hold and interact with their mobile devices will go a long way in helping you design for touch and voice.

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