As the visual designer at Morningstar, I provide an end-to-end product experience. The project scope varies from adding a feature to the existing website to building a new website for Morningstar Australasia.

Client: Morningstar

Role: Product Designer (UI/UX)

Year: 2020 - Present

Overview

Morningstar Australia provides investment research and ratings for stocks, funds, ETFs & LICs, news and tools for investors and financial professionals.

Morningstar Australia's mission is to empower investor success with great products that help investors reach their financial goals. Morningstar wants to help more investors build long-term value through investing, leading them to independence and, eventually, giving them the financial freedom to live their lives as they choose.

Project Goals

2020 - Morningstar Premium:

Deliver a new Portfolio Manager experience helping Investors manage their portfolios and promote better Investment behaviour and decision-making via the available tools. Ultimately, to engage in their investment journey and help to achieve their goal.

Problems to solve

Investors do not operate with perfect information or rationality. We need to understand their underlying needs, motivations and how they process the options they are faced with to make a decision and come to action.

Many of our Investors find it difficult to track their portfolios in one place, often they will have to do manual processes or pay different providers to track their portfolios and find investment ideas

Our primary objective was to deliver a Portfolio manager experience to help Investors track their portfolios in one place - Ultimately to become engaged and help Investors when they make important decisions to achieve their investment goals.

User Personas Overview

Investing is a personal journey - every investor has different goals, and these all drive the unique underlying needs each investor must address and the ‘missions’ they face. Based on our survey and research on our retail website we segment Morningstars Premium investors into 2 categories:

The Less-Sophisticated Investor

An early investor, searching for reassurance for decision support to build confidence to act. She values reliable and trusted sources of information with simple and easy-to-understand products to guide her step by step to make investment decisions.

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE

Learn to invest
Build portfolio
Monitor investments
Evaluate investments

Sophisticated Investors

An investor who has accumulated significant experience in the world of investments. She searching for empowerment and personal achievement. She is experienced and confident but still monitors closely and swoops only when the time is right. She wants detailed coverage but values curated high-quality information.

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE

Discover new investment ideas
Monitor investments
Build portfolio

Solutions & Testing

Our solution approach is to deliver a Portfolio manager that only Morningstar can build - embed ourselves in the investing journey of our Investors and help build a curated journey that increases the relevancy of our insights by providing timely access to the tools, research, data and editorial that is included in Morningstar Premium website.

In order to do this we need to transform a portfolio tracking feature (Sharesight) into a holistic solution that enables our Investors to identify an investing approach that will enable them to meet their goals, track progress against those goals, analyse their portfolios and discover new investments.

For user testing, we used mid-fidelity clickable prototypes and qualitative interviews to gain contextual and functional insights throughout the experience. Participants were asked to complete a number of tasks including putting together a page of their preference for portfolio manager, searching for specific security to add to their portfolio and tracking their investments.

Key Insights

During the research and testing, several key insights emerged, they were found to be common among the majority of participants and continued to occur in later stages of testing

1. Search for reassurance (Am I doing it right?) - Users look at various sources especially Morningstar analyst's commentary and assessment to confirm they are on the right track in their decision-making.

2. Investing is an interest/hobby - Like many interest/hobby enthusiasts, users have grown in their experience, investing style + knowledge and even respect + like/love managing their investments.

3. Multiple tools - Users are used to using more than 1 tool to manage their investments. For instance, some use Google Sheet/MS/Excel/Quicken as a backup for documenting their investments. Also, a majority use print/online news sources for confirmation, comparison and/or quick updates.

4. Top Goals: Retirement and leave Legacy - The majority of users had goals of retirement and leaving a legacy to younger family members (e.g. their children and/or relatives).

5. Average investing day/week - On average, users visit morningstar.com for any news or updates to articles, news, markets, research, and quick portfolio check.

Outcome / UI Implementation

After prioritising concepts, I worked closely with the product manager to develop a roadmap and implementation for the delivery of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

The MVP comprised four key concepts that span the end-to-end experience from planning an Investment goal to tracking their Investments, this included:

Seamless experience connecting the Portfolio Manager to their previous portfolios and broker.
A dashboard experience embedded with our research data and benchmark to Investors' portfolios.
Provide Morningstar X-ray feature to help Investor analyse each portfolio and drill down to the security level of a holding's database that covers 300,000 globally managed investments.
Access to our Discover Investments screener to find Investment ideas that suit their goals.

Morningstar Premium Portfolio Manager landing page :