Role

As the Lead Product Designer for the Folio project at OppenheimerFunds, my role involved orchestrating the entire design process in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team. From conducting extensive user research and crafting effective strategies to creating UI designs, facilitating user interviews, overseeing testing, and prototyping, I played a pivotal role in driving the project towards success.

Team

Myself + Konrad Bieniek (Junior Designer) + Peter Van Hengel (Lead Dev) + Tharun George Babu (Senior Engineer)

Company

OppenheimerFunds (Invesco)

Insights

The Folio project was initiated to elevate the efficiency and communication channels of 12 private investment teams managing a staggering $250 billion at OppenheimerFunds. The survey results revealed a remarkable 80% reduction in effort for analysts and portfolio managers, leading to a weekly time saving of 200 hours and an anticipated annual impact exceeding $1,000,000. The core challenges revolved around on-the-road struggles, communication turnaround time, the risk of intellectual property loss, and an ineffective research preparation process.

Opportunity

Identified opportunities encompassed addressing hardships in accessing data and difficulties in collaboration, particularly focusing on on-the-road challenges, communication inefficiencies, and intellectual property risk. The aim was to streamline workflows, provide compliant alternatives to non-compliant tools, and enhance the research preparation process for portfolio managers and analysts.

Goals

Primary goals included achieving 25% increased individual work efficiency, a minimum 10% yearly increase in overall business sales, and improving transparency between employees and the company.

Identifying Workflow Pattern

User Discovery played a pivotal role in the Folio project, engaging with diverse investment teams focused on various sectors, regions, industries, and investment areas. The primary objective of these user sessions was to unearth common challenges that could be addressed in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and subsequently scaled over time. The extensive two-month-long process involved multiple user sessions with different investment teams.

To ensure consistency and gather quantifiable data and feedback, I developed a script that guided these user sessions effectively. This script became a valuable tool in extracting insights and understanding the nuances of the workflows around research and team collaboration within the investment teams. The aim was to identify high-level problem areas that could be prioritized for the MVP.

Through these sessions, it became apparent that commonly used note-taking apps such as OneNote, Evernote, Pages, and GoodReader were prevalent among investment teams. However, they were identified as non-compliant applications, raising concerns about potential intellectual property loss at an enterprise level. This realization underscored the significance of developing a compliant and secure platform like Folio to address these challenges and mitigate risks, emphasizing the project's strategic importance.

User Journey Map

User sessions were integral to the design process, informing the creation of journey maps that outlined the activities, thoughts, and emotions of investment team members during their research life cycle. A key challenge emerged in handling and streamlining various forms of existing research, leading to the necessity of corresponding tickers/tags for future search and usage. The focus shifted to establishing a consistent ticker/tag system scalable across diverse investment focuses. In collaboration, the team identified high-demand functionalities crucial for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), prioritizing the backend structure for ticker creation and designing a logic framework for non-registered companies, like pre-IPOs. This strategic approach ensured the design addressed critical user needs, laying a robust foundation for project development.

Sketch

Visuals always help!
Utilizing sketches proved instrumental in visualizing the product's workflow, offering tangible representations of its usage in context. These sketches facilitated a swift and effective alignment between users and the product, ensuring a shared direction and meeting expectations at a high level. Throughout this practice, we identified a challenge in supporting a variety of research input types and patterns. Particularly, addressing users who don't take notes digitally posed a unique challenge. In response, we explored innovative solutions, discovering tools like Transcribe for audio-to-text transition and OCR Scanning tool APIs that could seamlessly integrate with Folio, enhancing its capabilities and accommodating diverse user preferences.

Final Design

More Works to Browse