Advisor Dashboard
When less is more

Project

A San Mateo-based financial institution needed to refresh its advisor dashboard.

Primary Issue

The dashboard layout was too busy for users to digest information quickly.

Challenges

  • I was engaged by the client as a visual designer only after their internal UX lead finalized the wireframes for the new dashboard layout. This severely restricted the visual design options for streamlining the dashboard.
  • Most of the visual elements such as the fonts, colors, and iconography couldn’t be changed because they were being utilized elsewhere in the site. Likewise, the images and product names were all provided by the client.
  • Interactive elements such as tabs, buttons and lists also needed to closely mimic existing elements so that the front-end developer would only need to subclass the existing code.

Solutions

In order to address the primary issue, I redeveloped the layout for each of the sections and tools by:

  • Unifying the dashboard as a whole with a minimal aesthetic that provided just enough visual information to present the data as needed for a specific task.
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  • Opening up the white space around all of the data so that users could digest information at a glance.
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  • Implementing simple layout tricks to group related elements (e.g., same size, smaller margins between related elements, slightly larger margins between sections).
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  • Adding prominent headers with larger text and bold fonts to explicitly label each section.

Retrospective

Originally, the client wanted to change everything about the dashboard but ultimately due to the constraints of the predetermined wireframe, we arrived at a workable compromise. I was able to strip out all of the visual noise and deliver a cleaner and much more usable dashboard.