My research began with advisor client calls that allowed me to gain a better understanding of their pain points and fund purchase process. After gathering all of my findings, I began to brainstorm solutions:

Through my research, I determined that it would be necessary to create an explore, request, and track page. In order for the new feature to be consistent with the platform, I first needed to have a clear understanding of the flow for submitting an access request for a fund and accepting an access request. This process involves the advisor and the fund manager (FM).

I then conducted market research to make sure that I was adhering to storefront best practices for the explore page. I noticed several trends in features which I made sure to include in my screens:

Based off of my research, I was then able to create low fidelity wireframes and presented them to stakeholders and developers to make sure that my design was feasible and fit the requirements.

The stakeholders and dev team discovered several edge cases that were not on the radar before. After speaking to fund managers, they said that they did not want advisors to see fund names until they had access to them. Therefore, I could only show the company names and the security types of their products on the explore page.

The product team also decided that they wanted to take a phase out approach to ensure that the feature would get enough engagement with its base functionality. This meant that only advisors could send access requests to the fund manager through the platform, but the fund manager would need to contact the advisor through email to reply.

If users are struggling to find a company that they want to buy products from, they can either click on the "Explore" hyperlink or tab to get to the “Explore” page. They can then look through all of the companies that are on the platform and filter by security type to find the ideal product for their client.

Once an advisor selects a company, they are able to fill out the necessary details in order to send a request. Since most advisors have lots of clients and little time, I made the name and email fields prepopulate to make the request process more time efficient.

Once a user submits the request, they are able to track its status through the banner message on the “Access Request” page. If the request is accepted/rejected the advisor will get an email of the request status. If the company approves the request, they will then be able to see the new products on the buy page.

The main challenge that I faced was that it was difficult to gather requirements from both stakeholders due to limited communication with fund managers. This set back my design process since I didn't know that I couldn't include names of funds until I had already finished my low fidelity wireframes. I learned that it's best to gather all requirements before starting to design.

Since the product team decided that it would be beneficial to first test if the explore feature would get enough engagement with fund manager communication done through email, we decided to set some success metrics: