Morgan Stanley: Information Universe

Information Universe was a client project while working for Infosys limited. The project was a 1-month onsite project in New York City with one of the largest investment firms in the world, Morgan Stanley. Our ask was to redesign their data analytics platform, Information Universe. The company has enormous collections of information that include data about their investment solutions, the many different financial instruments they offer, proprietary reports created by their teams of analysts, and more. This data is spread out over hundreds of thousands of repositories, with ownership spread out seemingly randomly throughout the organization. The Information Management team wanted a way to analyze the metadata of the repositories, such as registered owner, cost center allocation, length of time since it has been updated, etc, in order to make decisions about that data. This way the team could discover repositories that were not in compliance with their data security and data integrity policy and work with those repository owners to bring them into compliance.

I was brought on to this project to be both the onsite UX lead and to provide direction to the offshore teams. One of my biggest tasks on this project was meeting with stakeholders within the organization to learn about their user needs and how to incorporate them into the high-fidelity prototypes. My day to day activities would usually include creating wireframes and low fidelity mockups of my ideas and getting them approved by the client. Then, once a consensus was reached, I moved forward with those designs to create high fidelity, clickable versions.

This process involved meeting regularly with stakeholders to ensure that our design was meeting expectations. I would hold regular meetings with the client to discuss the designs that have been created so far and then incorporating any feedback into an updated version on Figma> I would then relaying this information to the offshore teams at night so they can continue to develop. This allowed the prototypes to be developed very quickly as work was being done at most hours of the day.

The application went through a drastic change over the course of the project. One of the most significant changes was the main homepage and navigation method. The previous design was very text-based and relied heavily on the use of text boxes. It felt very outdated and it took a lot of memorization and training in order to be able to understand how to use it. The new design migrated to a visual navigation method that utilized subtle visual cues to denote hierarchy and used images instead of text wherever possible. The new design is much more intuitive to use and even new users will understand how to navigate to the information they need even on their first use. At the end of the engagement, the prototype was handed to development with the help of another member of the Digital Experience team to oversee the programming phase.