UBS Workstation

FOCUS: PRODUCT DESIGN

ROLE: CREATIVE DIRECTOR / TEAM LEAD

ACTIVITIES: STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT, RESEARCH, UI/UX DESIGN, PROTOTYPING, USER TESTING

The UBS workstation is the backbone of financial advisor’s tool set.

UBS works with private clients, institutions and corporations around the world to help answer some of life’s questions – whether through expert wealth management advice, investment banking and asset management expertise, or general banking advice in Switzerland. In collaboration with the frog team, the UBS workstation team embarked on an experience and UI overhaul of their financial advisor workstation.

The Ask: We were tasked with creating a design system to modernize the financial advisor workstation for UBS Americas.

The advisor workstation is a collection of over 500 applications and functions that allow financial advisor to serve their clients.

The team started to work backwards from the expansive research and document journeys that the UBS team had created over the course of several months. These journies helped the team identify key “moments that matter” to deep dive into in our own research.

Throughout the project we had close partnership and engagement with our UBS stakeholders. We brainstormed ideas with them, and explored opportunity areas.

Deep diving with customers to build empathy and shared understanding.

Building on the knowledge that the UBS team already had the frog team set out to meet advisors and their teams to better understand their objectives and painpoints first hand.

End to end product design

My team designed the key product screens and workflows that defined the core functionality of the workstation. Concurrently, we developed UI patterned and UI components that would eventually create a greater comprehensive design system for all of the workstation applications.

UX Details

My team conducted over 15 different usability sessions and 40+ 1:1 and focus group format advisor feedback sessions. We ran 15, two week design sprints in an agile fashion, getting customer feedback in every sprint. This process helped up dive deep into how customers’ wanted to work and how our solutions met or did not meet their needs.

Trade cart: One innovation we developed was the inclusion of command based entries within the trade cart input. After discussing with traders we discovered that many had specific actions they wanted to perform which were mathematical derivations of an existing portfolio such as liquidate 12 percent or increase position by 50 percent. For this, they frequently relied on calculators but with this innovation they could submit their intent and the trade cart would handle the calculations for them.

Inline Transaction Editing: We found that Financial analysts and Traders sometimes make mistakes and in order to correct those mistakes they had to rush through multiple windows to retract a transaction or modify a detail of a transaction. Some transactions had a time window for changes and so therefore we provided inline editing of a transaction after the transaction was submitted if it was allows by the system. This would save users countless crucial seconds or minutes to make changes.

Account toggle: Financial analysts frequently worked with numerous entities and sub-accounts within a single relationship. It was essential for them to grasp the connections between accounts and to navigate through various accounts effortlessly. We dedicated three design sprints to address this challenge, fundamentally altering our approach and ultimately refining a solution that effectively addressed both the primary use case and the edge cases.