Defining Scope

At the start of the project, our stakeholders provided us with a “first version” of the solution that they had in mind. To our surprise, our customer had intended for us to conduct a re-design.

However after initial conversations with end users, we quickly learned that the proposed solution failed to address the underlying pain points around centralization, easy access, and complexity of data. Our team set out to conduct a time condensed discovery process in order to quickly propose low fidelity wireframes of a solution that would address our user’s needs to our stakeholders.

Let’s meet our users

At the start of discovery, we had a conception of a single general user type. This was because JPMC’s original design indicated that the needs of users across Compliance teams could be met through a single dashboard. To validate this, we underwent a rigorous user interview process meeting with all divisions of the Compliance group, amounting to near 30 interviews in the span of two weeks.

We quickly found that the user needs varied greatly not just across divisions but even within teams across roles. For example, C-suite level users across teams were focused on spotting trends to identify emerging risks, whereas analyst-level users required a view of tasks requiring completion.

We summarized these findings through high-level user archetypes that became key in the final design.

After collaborating and iterating on our final solution with the different teams in the Compliance department, we submitted our designs and gained signoff from our stakeholders. As the contract was only for design deliverables, these designs were passed on to JP Morgan’s internal engineering teams for development.

Customization

The final solution was a widget-based dashboard, with a focus on customization. This was because we had learned that teams and users of different seniority utilized disparate datasets and pre-existing dashboards. In fact, even a same user leveraged different types of data sets based on the task at hand.

Our solutions enabled users to add, remove, and re-arrange widgets with the goal that users could construct a tailored homepage for themselves. While not included for an MVP, we also added it as a potential backlog feature to enable users to construct multiple views for themselves depending on the JTBD.

Guided Experience

A key part of our design centered around our user archetype research. While the Portal was fully customizable, we created default layouts of widgets based on user type, with the intention of guiding the initial experience for users.

The C-suite user’s default layout was populated with widgets consolidated data across teams and geographic regions, in an effort to aid users in spotting trends. The Analyst-level user’s default layout, on the other hand, was populated with the user’s team-specific widgets, with a focus on the ability to manipulate data and product reports.

Data Density

The majority of our design process was spent taking a deep dive into the data needs of teams and consolidating existing reports and dashboards. Each widget in our final deliverable is a high level summary of information, with the ability to drill-down through overlay windows. We heavily utilized tree map diagrams, double pie charts, and bar graphs for most widgets.

We also included the ability to switch between tabular and graphic formats within each widget, as well as universal and widget level filters. These features were primarily geared towards analyst users, who were often monitoring and diving deeper into datasets.

Go the Extra Mile

Our contract with JPMC required only designing a single consolidated dashboard. We definitely over-delivered in designing drill-down views of each widget and multiple default layouts of the Portal. However, the extra effort we put in was rewarded by an additional contract with JPMC for future Compliance work.