Advisor Workstation

Advisor Workstation is Morningstar's investment research platform for financial professionals. After 20 years of ad hoc design patches it carried UX debt in every workflow: previews, reports, and components each opened in a new browser tab, and advisors lost their place between them.

Decisions

One framework instead of new tabs. The redesign keeps research, editing, and reports inside a single framework with the same content hierarchy on every page, so an advisor stays in one place from screening an investment to producing the report.

Information architecture built around the report. Advisors want research and portfolio updates as reports, so each top-level menu leads to a collection of one kind of object, the advisor creates or edits an object, and the workflow ends in a summary or report.

A typeface change ahead of the redesign. Replacing Verdana with Morningstar's own Univers in the legacy product moved users toward the new look early. Verdana sets wider than Univers, so the swap broke no existing layout.

Designers own the problem, not the ticket. I introduced a process where designers define epic and story tickets with business owners, write the problem statement with product owners, and test the agreed solution with end users before build.

Outcome

Redesigned the Investment Screener, the Portfolio Construction Tool, and Hypothetical Illustration on the Morningstar Design System. I designed on the product from 2016 as Senior Visual Designer and led the redesign as Design Lead in 2021 with a team of 4 designers, working with 6 product owners and 20+ developers. The team adopted the design process as its standard.

Screens

Before and after screens of the Investment Screener and the Portfolio Construction Tool, the Hypothetical Illustration report flow, the framework that replaced the multi-tab workflow, the information architecture map, the legacy typeface change, and the design process diagram.