Wilshire Associates is a leading diversified global financial, independent investment consulting and services firm. They provide consulting services, analytics solutions and customized investment products to plan sponsors, investment managers and financial intermediaries. Wilshire provides services to clients in more than 20 countries representing more than 500 organizations with assets totaling approximately $7 trillion USD.
They needed a suite of mobile apps created (from 0 to 1) so that their clients could access select financial data from anywhere easily.
My Role
My Role: UX/UI Designer
This project boasted an ultra-lean team of three, myself and two developers. My role was to collect research, complete market research, create wireframes, craft high fidelity mockups, host all client feedback sessions, and guide development through all approved designs.
Goals
Wilshire Mobile Suite
Create a suite of products that provides a way for clients to access important data and manager news anywhere. This data should be easy to access from multiple devices and should only require an internet connection.
The user experience and interface should be built around a mobile first approach. The suite includes four main web based applications that will have varying degrees of interactivity. The four applications will include the Asset/ Liability Monitor, Investment Research, Manager News Alerts and Performance and Risk Reports.
Asset/Liability Monitor
The Asset/Liability Monitor provide clients with a daily, monthly or quarterly view based on their level of access. This app displays table data or charts that provide asset, liability and funded ratio information for specified time ranges. This allows the user to get an overall feel for change over time.
Investment Research
The Investment Research application lets clients access Wilshire’s resource archive to view or download. This includes investment white papers, and monthly and quarterly capital market perspectives.
Manager News Alerts
The Manager News Alerts application allows the user to receive their manager news alerts through the app as an alternative to the weekly email.
Performance and Risk Reports
The Performance and Risk Reports app allow the user to access quarterly performance books and executive summaries as well as monthly flash reports.
The Solution
Research
The most valuable time spent was listening to the client and taking detailed notes about who their user is and to really understand how they will be using the applications. The client had a lot of specific insight into who would be using these apps due to it’s highly specific demographic and the information they would need to access and from what device they would be accessing it from. We just had to listen to understand exactly how these would be used and then built the interface around those interactions and needs.
We talked directly to future users to learn what kind of devices they owned and how they used them, how often they upgraded their technology and what devices they lean on the most during the work day. This informed a lot of the ux, ui and development choices that we ended up making.
A lot of the data visibility depended on
the level of access that the user has so we discussed that with the client to make sure that we were prioritizing the types of users in order to favor spending time on interactions that were most important to the user experience. We looked into various solutions and tested them thoroughly before making a commitment to how we wanted the charts and database specifically to work.
Wireframes
Due to the highly specific nature of the information contained in these applications, the wireframing stage became a very important tool in this project.
Wireframes were very helpful in getting everyone from all the different departments on the same page to discuss functionality. There were mock ups that walked through a variety of steps including login scenarios, navigation, email sequences, date range accessing and most all other possible user flows for each application.
Branding
We took the time to thoughtfully brand the individual applications in this suite. These icons work together but we made sure that each one can also stand alone on its own.
Each icon that is associated with the individual applications was vector rendered and visually and conceptually represents a functional aspect of that application so that they are recognizable at a glance.
Design
Keeping the look and feel of the existing Wilshire brand was important to the client, so we used some existing styles but really focused the ui around a comfortable mobile experience.
We wanted to make sure that when a user picked up their mobile device they would have no problems accessing any of the information they were looking for on any of the apps. Keeping a clean interface was important because of the amount
of information that was being displayed. Solving certain date range displays we walked a fine line between quantity and quality. But in the end the user experience guided every thoughtful decision made.
Post Launch
Press & Client Praise
After the launch of Wilshire mobile we hosted a follow up meeting with the client and the feedback was very positive. The project has become a successful tool for the client and was featured in multiple online financial articles.
