Helping advisors stay productive and connected with a persona-based portal

Industry: Wealth Management


Duration: 4 months


Role: Lead Designer


Objective: Redesign and rebuild a portal to provide a seamless, personalized, and user-friendly experience for financial advisors, enabling them to make impactful, data-driven decisions efficiently.

Activities:

  • Heuristic Evaluation

  • Discovery research

  • Insight report

  • Information architecture

  • Ideation, Co creation and prioritization workshops

  • High-fidelity mockups and prototypes

  • Style guide creation

Project Background

With exponential growth, the wealth management organization’s advisor portal struggled to keep up, becoming limited, unclear, outdated, and underrealized. Advisors relied on the portal as their home base, but it no longer met their needs.

We partnered with the client to redesign and build a modern, user-centered portal. The redesign enforced seamless integration, streamlined service and content, and ensured advisors could focus on making an impact in their clients’ most important moments.

My Role and Responsibilities

As the lead designer, I translated research insights into strategic design solutions, ensuring a user-centered approach. Partnering with a strategist who owned research moderation and analysis, I conducted a heuristic evaluation, synthesized findings, and created visuals for co-creation. Building on these insights, I drove the design process and guided another designer in executing the vision.

Process and Approach

Our team followed a structured process to understand the pain points, align on strategic goals, and design an intuitive experience that met advisors' needs.

Discovery

16 interviews with corporate stakeholders & field users

23.5 hours of interviews

Synthesis & Reporting

Synthesized discovery learnings to deliver an insights report with key opportunity areas for ideation and co-creation

Co-Creation

Ideated with corporate team members based in three opportunity areas

Co-created four key ideas with field users

Prioritized updates and solutions for design and development

Design & Recommend

Designed UX/UI for prioritized updates

Identified requirements and planned for development sprints

Design:

Based on our research insights, we designed a role-based, flexible, and intuitive advisor portal, including:

  • Role-based personalized home page: Configurable to user needs, helping advisors save time, make data-driven decisions, and focus on client priorities.

  • Knowledge Sharing Library: Enabled easy access to shared insights, ensuring advisors could tap into the firm’s collective expertise.

  • Enhancements to key pages: Improved Client 360, Notifications, and Service Tickets for a more seamless user experience.

Style Guide:

  • We developed the style guide gradually while designing the portal, aligning the visual direction and serving as a reference for the team to ensure future updates remain cohesive and user-friendly.

  • While retaining the client’s old colors and fonts, we reimagined everything else to elevate the design and unify the new and old pages.

  • This style guide has laid the foundation for the portal’s future growth, providing a scalable tool to maintain and enhance the user experience over time.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges:

  • The existing portal was outdated and didn’t align with advisors’ workflows.

  • Users struggled with content organization and knowledge sharing.

  • Advisors needed access to key financial data but lacked a centralized view.

  • The portal lacked intelligent search functionality.

Solutions:

  • Conducted user research to understand pain points, then redesigned the experience based on real user needs.

  • Introduced a Knowledge Sharing Library for easy content discovery and collaboration.

  • Implemented AUM reports, providing critical insights for data-driven decision-making.

  • Integrated Coveo AI-powered search, enhancing relevance and usability.

Impact and Results

  • Achieved the highest engagement with the portal since its launch, delivering greater value to all users.

  • Advisors received the tools and features they needed to succeed, resulting in:
    - Streamlined workflows
    - Improved user satisfaction
    - Enhanced ability to focus on meaningful client interactions

  • Due to the success of the portal redesign, the client has contracted our team for additional portal design work.

Reflections

This project underscored the importance of research-driven design and collaboration. Conducting the heuristic evaluation and developing personas allowed me to advocate for user-centered solutions effectively. The experience strengthened my ability to align stakeholder goals with user needs and deliver impactful, scalable design solutions.

I wish we had the opportunity to conduct usability testing and stay involved during the development phase to support implementation. Unfortunately, these aspects were outside our control due to client decisions and budget constraints.

Feedback

“It has been a pleasure working with Alaa on the advisor portal project. As my first project at Slalom, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with her, as she guided me through Slalom’s design process from day one. Alaa’s leadership in design, thoughtful collaboration, and clear task division made the project seamless. Her design debriefs were always insightful, and her expertise in Figma—along with the tips and tricks she shared—made the design process more efficient while helping me grow as an experience designer.

I admire how effortlessly she facilitates working sessions, leads design presentations, and problem-solves in client meetings. Having her as a mentor on this project has been invaluable, and her contributions played a key role in the client's decision to extend more work to Slalom—a testament to her impact and expertise.”

—Ellen L., Associate Consultant at Slalom

“Alaa was an incredible team member and support during this project work from helping lead interviews to being a thought partner in all debriefs and analysis to report writing and workshop support all before shining in her strength of design.

She owned the heuristic assessment which was incredibly thorough and provided us with opportunities early in the work that won a lot of trust with our key stakeholders including the Chief Technology Officer. Although I wasn't around full time for the design piece of the work, I know she was just as thorough and creative with her designs. Her clickable prototype again delighted all the stakeholders and provided a beautiful leave behind for the team to use in new business pitches even as the portal is officially built out.

Even in areas where she is learning and developing, Alaa was willing to jump in. Although I know the work itself and the client were challenging at times, I appreciated her flexibility and willingness to dig into the work that needed done.”

—Jessica P., Senior Principal at Slalom