Iress  — Wealth Management & Financial Advisory

My roles: Product Designer
Task
Build and embed new features for financial advisers and banking workers, suitable for non-expert users.
About
Founded in 1993, Iress provides software to the financial services industry in the Asia-Pacific, North America, Africa, and the UK & Europe, with more than 500,000 users globally.
Discovery
Goal: learn about business goals, product value, user outcome, and output.
I worked on Iress’s product called Xplan. It’s complete and comprehensive financial planning and wealth management software for advice practices of any size — from the smallest IFA to the largest networks.

My job was to build new features for security-related actions, pension switching, report generation, cash instructions, and other banking procedures.
While some features were released globally, others were designed locally for specific clients. Because such white-labelled solutions allowed a client to make local adjustments, I had to ensure the designs were versatile and wouldn’t be compromised if the client's engineering team switched fonts or the primary colour.
Research
Goal: explore the market, understand target users and CMP, uncover design opportunities.
CMP: Context, Mission, Problem
Collaborating with product owners and managers, the design team applied the CMP method to systematically break down a task and create a focused plan of action.

As an example, below is the CMP for one of the tasks:
Context: describe the current situation and background
  • Xplan is a complex application that is hard to navigate for non-expert users.
  • Advisers might not have time for Xplan training.
  • Xplan includes various add-ons from both Iress and third parties.
Mission: define the product's goal
  • Ensure users can quickly navigate within both Xplan and its add-ons to perform the desired task.
  • Gather feedback from users to learn if this feature solves the problem.
Problem:  identify the challenge preventing success
  • Advisers might struggle with discovering information.
  • Advisers might not know where to click to achieve their goals.
  • Users (all audiences) might get lost in Xplan and struggle with initiating a user flow.
Persona Building
The target audience consists of financial advisers or employees of financial/banking facilities. Financial functionalities such as pension switching or cash instructions require employees from various departments to access data for verification purposes.

For example, a KYC/KYB analyst might need to download a report and review colleagues’ comments. Given this scenario, several questions arise:
How can we prevent other employees from making accidental clicks?
Is the target audience tech-savvy? How far with novelty can we go?
Competitive Analysis
Wealth management and financial advisory are well-established globally but sometimes rely on outdated software.

While this gave the product an advantage when localising features for various markets, I was careful not to impose heavy learning on users.

Below are examples of common software used for pension switching:
User Experience Design
Goal: build a clear structure, design useful and delightful experience to interact with.
Service Design & Dynamic Layout
Due to legacy features, I had to identify overlapping functionalities and limitations by mapping out the service process. Here’s a simplified example of the service blueprint I built to uncover system touchpoints.

We introduced a step-by-step process in some of Xplan's features, following a waterfall-like flow, where each step depended on the data from the previous one. This approach helped prevent user confusion.
One of the features created by the design team was a dynamic layout that preserved the grid structure.

For instance, when users were manually filling out over 10 pages of forms, the system helped double-check the data — irrelevant fields would not appear unless there was a mistake.
Unlike the design process for Stenn — Factoring & Invoice Financing, where I added a wireframing step to conduct usability testing and design review sessions while building a design system from scratch, building Xplan's features required me to create high-fidelity options at once and update the design system on the fly.
User Interviews & Usability Testing
Client feedback and surveys gathered for CPM (context, problem, mission) provided qualitative insights but couldn't be considered testing due to the lack of measurable, controlled data.

My role involved writing test scripts, generating hypotheses, conducting moderated usability tests, and translating observations into quantitative metrics.

Read Usability Test Report

See the created variants, hypotheses, and testing overview.
read report
User Interface Design
Goal: create an aesthetic look to reinforce the UX solutions, and enhance the design system.
Contrast Requirements: WCAG
Failing to follow WCAG can result in legal repercussions in various countries, including the UK, USA, and Australia. Non-compliance may lead to fines and damage an organisation's reputation.

The minimum text contrast ratio should be 4.5:1, but we enhanced the design system by introducing ratios higher than 5.06:1 for better readability and compliance.
While writing UX copy, I had to ensure it aligned with global terms and, for local features, country-specific terminology. The goal was to promote both internal and external tools and provide guidance for non-expert users.

More Iress designs

See other prototypes developed for this project on my Dribbble.
View prototypes

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v.magnusgraphics@gmail.com