Black Diamond Client Experience

DISCOVERY, USER RESEARCH, UX & UI DESIGN, USER TESTING, VIDEO MARKETING

Project Overview

The Black Diamond Client Experience is more than a portal, it’s a gateway to an immersive digital hub. Through a custom-branded, interactive online environment, clients will have anytime, anywhere access to their financial life. With advisors driving engagement, this branded experience goes beyond portfolio metrics to provide their clients with a complete wealth outlook.

My Contributions

Managed the product experience and design of the Black Diamond native mobile and tablet applications as well as the platform administration subset. During this time, our new client portal won multiple WealthManagement.com Industry Awards in Best Client Portal, Best Portfolio Management, Accounting and Performance Reporting, and Best Client Reporting.

Understanding our Client's clients

Before beginning the process of building this new client experience we needed a better understanding of who our clients' clients really are. For the longest time Black Diamond's view of the end client was all pretty one sided, that they were wealthy older people in post-retirement more concerned with cashflow than achieving smaller financial goals. To break this paradigm we first conducted a series of qualitative interviews with a set of advisors that used the current investor experience. After gaining their trust and sharing the product we were working on, they then allowed us access to talk directly with their clients. We learned that the client user types were much more varied and spread out, and especially with new personal finance robo-advisor options on the market, there were far more clients in the pre-retirement phase with financial goals in mind than those in post-retirement.

Navigating the user journey

One obstacle that we needed to overcome was the addition of more spaces and how clients would navigate through them. The previous investor experience only showed portfolio metrics so the sitemap was relatively simple. With this new endeavor we were adding full account management, net worth and balance sheet, financial planning, and more along with a more complicated onboarding flow.

Native Mobile App

In late 2016 Black Diamond wanted to expand their client experience with a native mobile option. While they did have something in the AppStore, it was only a specialty item for certain clients and wildly outdated as a simple webview. The limitations they had faced with the difficulty of whitelabeling prohibited Black Diamond from developing a fully custom native mobile app. I was an integral part of the team building the proof of concept of a fully native Black Diamond Client Experience. I was the design lead and collaborated with a tech lead and product manager from discovery to launch of this product.

Web Experience Redesign

Along with a new native mobile experience, the web client portal needed a design refresh to match those same offerings. The current client experience web portal just displayed portfolio metrics and nothing else. There wasn't any content that was engaging enough to get client's to log in more than once a month at the most, and they didn't have an easy way to communicate with their advisors if they had a question. On the new approach we brought more of a focus on account balances, top holdings, and advisor driven content. This experience could be fully customizable to show whichever content advisors view as most important.

Before

After

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Simplified Option

Full Customization

One of the requirements for this project was that it needed to be completely whitelabled for our clients. They needed to be able to include not just their logo, but also their own color pallet to match their brand. On the previous client experience this process was basically a free-for-all. The experience provided a color picker where the client could pick their primary, secondary, and tertiary colors visually or by hexcode. This was a bad experience because most of our clients could not find the exact colors for their brand or did not know the exact hexcodes to use. I analyzed all the firms on the system, pulled the inputted colors and found the most common hues. From this I created a set amount of color themes for our firms to pick from.

Blue Steel

Ruby Red

Emerald Sea

Riptide

Tangerine Dream

Merlot

Evergreen

marketing

As we were getting close to launching the new Black Diamond Client Experience native mobile app we were faced with the issue of promotion especially at our parent company's annual conference, Deliver. We wanted to show our face and make a stand in the wealth management client portal experience. So I worked on a vide for the presentation at the conference.

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