Designing Clarity in Complexity: How a Unified Dashboard Empowered Advisors to Make Smarter, Faster Decisions

Senior UX Designer
Staff Product Designer
Q3 2018, Q2/3 2021, 2023
Product Strategy, Research, UI/UX design, Interaction design, Prototyping, User Testing, Training, Documentation

Role

1 Product Designer (myself)
VP of Product
2 Product Managers
4 UI Developers
QA Engineers
Sales
Customer Success

Team

MyVest’s SPS platform powers personalized portfolio management for enterprise wealth managers.

Challenge: Advisors and overlay portfolio managers needed a faster, more actionable way to interpret complex data across households, portfolios, and accounts.

Solution: Create an Advisor and Portfolio Manager Dashboard that transforms complex operational data into clear, contextual insights through a best-in-class, configurable experience.

Impact: Increased operational efficiency and reduced performance inquiries by 92%, securing two $400M enterprise clients within months of launch.

CLIENT OUTCOME

200k+

Enabled 360° visibility across AUM, accounts, and alerts in real time driving 200k+
investor onboarding

92%

Time to identify portfolio drift or policy violations decreased by 45%, while 92% of users reported faster and confident decision-making.

$800M

Strengthened MyVest’s enterprise offering — instrumental in securing
two $400M sponsor clients

 

 Discovery

Early research and target audience interviews revealed key pain points:

  • Advisors juggled multiple tools and reports to monitor portfolio drift, tax events, and account exceptions.

  • Overlay managers required operational visibility into trading workflows and drift alerts across thousands of portfolios.

  • Both groups struggled with information overload — large data grids, inconsistent navigation, and lack of visual prioritization.

From stakeholder interviews and SPS usage analytics, three opportunity
areas emerged:

  1. Consolidate high-frequency actions and alerts in one customizable dashboard.

  2. Enable real-time situational awareness (drift, exceptions, AUM changes) through visual indicators.

  3. Introduce a tiered information model — “Things to Know,” “Things to Act,” and “Things to Analyze” — aligning with each user’s cognitive workflow.

Ideation

Using insights from the discovery interviews and the critical dataset analysis led to mapped content types to user intents:

Design

Layout and Information Architecture

  • Adopted the “Three Zones” model:
Awareness (Alerts) → Action (Shortcuts) → Analysis (Charts & KPIs).

  • Key metrics (AUM, Drift %, New Accounts, Tax Harvesting Events) appear at the top of the dashboard, guiding the advisor’s eye.

Visual Design

  • Leveraged high-contrast colors and typography for fast scanning.

  • Incorporated role-based defaults: Advisors see client-level performance; overlay managers view cross-book trends.

  • Used consistent charting conventions (time-series line charts, treemaps for allocation, bar charts for growth rates).

 Customization

  • All widgets are drag-and-drop movable and resizable; advisors can tailor dashboards per workflow.

  • Sponsors can define a default “starter layout” per role, ensuring brand and compliance consistency.

Usability Testing

Prototypes were tested with 12 advisors and 6 overlay managers from three sponsor firms.

Key findings:

  • 92% found it “easier to identify high-priority accounts.”

  • Time to identify drift or policy violations dropped by 45%.

  • Users appreciated the modular customization but requested clearer save/persist behaviors.

Iterative refinements included:

  • Simplified filter controls and consistent use of sponsor terminology.

  • Introduced contextual breadcrumbs for navigation clarity.

  • Enhanced contrast for alerts to improve readability on mobile displays.

Challenges

  • Balancing data richness with cognitive load: The team had to reduce dashboard clutter while preserving analytical depth.

  • Sponsor branding vs. design consistency: Each enterprise wanted visual flexibility; we resolved this through a shared design system with color and logo overrides.

  • Real-time performance constraints: Integrating live drift data and overnight processes required optimization of data queries to maintain sub-second load times.

Improvements

  • Introduced role-based personas within configuration, aligning available widgets to user needs.

  • Added multi-format outputs (on-screen, PDF, Excel) for executive reporting.

  • Embedded call-to-action prompts — e.g., “Review Drift” or “Execute Rebalance” — linking insights to SPS workflows.

  • Future phases include predictive analytics (“Portfolio at Risk” scoring) and cross-firm benchmarking.

Next

Advisor Portal