ROLE: Senior Product Designer

SUMMARY

‌M1 Finance is a self-directed automated investing platform that allows you to trade more than 6,000 stocks and ETFs and manage your spending with its Owner's Reward Card, save in a high-yield savings account, and borrow through M1's Margin and Personal Loan products.

Previously called Admin internal tools is launching a new platform; Mission Control, a multi-app solution that will manage all functionality and tooling across the current Internal Tools apps: Admin, Trading Dashboard, and Managed Announcements.

 
 
 

CHALLENGE

M1 has outgrown its space within Admin, the teams needed a more robust system to handle all workflows and provide a complete management of clients accounts. Internally M1 needed role-based action control to create a more secure internal app for servicing customers. Along side this we wanted to tackle a few other issues:

  • Address tech debt concerns prior to large-scale initiatives kicking off across the org

  • Establish a fully self functioning system that would allow us to be a self cleared brokerage.

  • Enable better technology in our platforms by building a component library to speed up development and carry a consistent UI throughout the experience.

 
 
 

RESEARCH

Internally there would be 5 different operation teams using Mission Control. We wanted to make sure that with the introduction of permissions we were not removing any valuable information or actions from a users daily needs.

Using the ERAF method (Entities, Relationships, Attributes, Flows) it allowed us to lay out all of the functionality within Admin and map it to our internal users. Here we could see any overlap to know what information the teams would need and what would need to be hidden behind specific permissions.

We wanted to:

  • Define core workflows across roles and teams to determine UX requirements in the new system.

  • Create foundation to develop migration plan from Admin to Mission Control.

  • Create foundation to define Internal Tools' user personas and user journeys.

 
 
 
 
 

DEFINING ROLES

Spending time with the teams observing and discussing their day to day working in Admin helped us understand what information is necessary and important to see consistently, what information is used by specific teams, and what is shared throughout the system.

 
 
 
 
 

PREVIOUSLY ADMIN

Admin was built and managed by a group of talented engineers, though it worked great it was time for a much needed improvement to the architecture, and overall UX.

 
 
 
 
 
 

BRAINSTORM SESSIONS & USER FEEDBACK

I held a series of crazy 8’s brainstorm sessions and worked with the internal tools team to build initial wireframes to share with the operations teams. This was focused on the architecture, how did we want to reorganize this information so users can find what they need and get where they need to as quickly as possible.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  1. Users do not want information ‘hidden’ from them. Everything they need or want they needs to be visible so they can quickly access it.

  2. Functionality over aesthetics. The main goal was to make Mission Control functional so that M1’s ops team can start and complete their workflow as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

  3. More information is never enough information. They spend a lot of time in and out of multiple software’s & systems so having it all wrapped into one was a huge win.

 
 
 

BUILDING A DESIGN SYSTEM

While building Mission Control I spent time building M1’s first internal design system. Working with the engineers to create tokens, components and libraries all pulling from existing M1 branding assets. Though some components worked, Mission Control had a very specific need for UI elements. I also established rules and conditions for using components throughout the application. This really helped maintain a consistency throughout the experience.

As this was a constantly evolving library we noticed big improvements in the quality of work that was being completed once we had a library. The team was able to build (sometimes without designs, just components) quickly reusing components and I was able to design quicker and with confidence.

 
 
 
 
 
 

FINAL PRODUCT