AXA Investment

Creating an intuitive investment platform for independent financial advisors

The AXA Architas platform aggregates and visualises fund information from multiple investment companies, allowing financial advisers to create and manage portfolios all in one place. I completed this conceptual phase of work as part of a larger team for AXA Investment.

Role

UX Designer

Team

2 UX Designers
1 UI Designer

Duration

Two weeks

Tools

Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop

Key challenges

Generating and developing concepts at pace
Designing for high-complexity systems

Defining user needs and challenges

When developing a completely new product it is essential to start with the basic needs and challenges of the target user group. By seeing how the user currently performs their job and the tasks involved we can understanding which parts of the process can be improved.

For this project we found financial advisers often find it difficult to communicate the complexities of investment banking to their customers in a way that can be easily understood. From early on it was apparent we needed to visualise fund and portfolio information better.

Concept generation

Initial concepts focussed on the visual representation of investment portfolios and the funds contained within them. The main objective was to communicate to the investor how adjusting the composition of a portfolio affects the financial risk associated with it.

Various other ideas not originally in the brief were also explored at this stage.

Concept development

After presenting a number of ideas to the client, the strongest was selected and developed to a higher standard by me and the team.

As most of the visuals and interactions were fairly standard it was agreed that a prototype was unnecessary at this point. The key screens were refined and drawn up in Illustrator.

Visual realisation

Being a two week project, the bulk of the process was presented back to the client as low fidelity wireframes. However some of the key screens were developed further by the UI Designer and myself in order to give the client an idea of how the final product might look and feel.