Novus Partners
Novus is a world-leading portfolio intelligence platform with more than $2 trillion in client assets under management. Clients include hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations. Novus provides solutions that help clients view more data, process it faster, and gain insights to make smarter investment decisions.
Project
Novus Alpha Platform
Role
User Experience Director
Objectives
- Accelerate new user adoption
- Improve client retention
- Increase frequency of user engagement (daily, weekly, monthly)
- Unify experience platform and ecosystem
- Increase market recognition and market share
- Develop more intuitive navigation
- Reduce feature set bloat
- Create user experience “coherency”
_
Approach & Activities
Starting with research conducted through our internal analytics team and including monthly user interviews with high profile hedge fund managers, I prioritized client discovery and education along with activities/deliverables that would be most useful for my team, the project, and the client from day one:
- Reporting tool creation
- Platform redesign with frequent validation
- Information architecture improvement, with a focus on:
- Users / personas – human behavior and motivations
- Main navigation - redesign
- Information Architecture – clean up
- Interaction design – improve
- Visual design – redesign
- Content design
Challenges & Lessons
- Executive goals and business requirements changed often
- Multiple stakeholders with competing goals and intentions
- Internal client education and early product research are essential
Challenges were overcome by creating a comprehensive UX strategy that included:
- Design Activities
- Research
- Product road map
- Lean UX philosophy – faster iterations
- Design Sprints / Agile combo
- Monthly user interviews and usability testing
Impact
Increased Efficiency
- A lean navigation led to user findings more quickly
Increased Effectiveness
- Customers where able to complete tasks at a higher rate
Increased User Satisfaction
- Daily active usage increased by 12%
- Retention increased by 10%
Increased Self Support
- Decrease in customer email and phone inquiries
- Customer service and analyst efficiency and productivity increased
