Enterprise design often involves working within established design systems that support large, active user bases. Leveraging existing web components, my focus shifts to organizing information, defining hierarchy, and creating intuitive user experiences. This case study highlights several initiatives I led within Morgan Stanley’s internal employee portal and the approach used to bring them to life.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Client
Oliver Agency – Morgan Stanley
Duration
2.5 Years
Sector
Investment Banking & Wealth Management
Services
UI Design & UX Strategy
Contributors
Project Manager, Copywriter, Art Director, Business Stakeholders
Problem
An internal platform, this unnamed platform due to compliance reasons, is essentially a news outlet to help inform internal employees of the investment bank. With the system built to use components, I am tasked to understand the abilities of the platform and tailor information for client scenarios.
Constraints
As a web platform, we find the system is responsive and can maintain columns—a feature not available on other internal platforms. With this, we better understand how components can be arranged and formatted.
Approach
Using the components available, I have further defined page levels within the product experience. By creating a hierarchy within a page and within a system, I can best guide visitors within a platform. Moreover, by providing outlets for interior pages and a menu of articles, we can better nest information and search for content.
Solution
When testing the news page, we tested two scenarios. One provides several news pages for one microsite. The other provides only one news template. The difference is in the ability to sort. In this usability test, we presented both options and found one news template is all that is needed.
Impact
Finally, one important addition is the header banner. Meant to identify each microsite, often stage in production becomes very tedious. In my findings, I’ve found opportunities to group business units to have a similar function and therefore each banner uses a template which has gone through an extensive discovery. Above is a low-fi example of the banner which was provided. Several standards are called for: ADA compliance for reading the title, how to make impact in a campaign by using templates, reducing reading error by image format, and art direction embellishments.
