Moody’s Analytics

The project was in a very early stage when I joined it, and was being ran by a team that was largely new to creating products and working in an agile, iterative fashion. All that existed was what was internally referred to as a ‘demo’ but was in reality a selection of visual mock ups showing various features. There were no user journeys, key tasks or user stories to support the project at this stage and little familiarity with them as concepts, requiring me to attempt to guide the team through that process prior to any design work taking place.

This led to a number of different approaches to drive the project forward, from visual user flows and wireframes, to writing stories or personas, but in the end the team most responded to, and understood, visual mock ups. Not the most efficient way of working, but one that got things moving on what was a tight timescale! This led to my having to design features on an almost speculative basis to present back to the team, then make any required updates before those designs then being shown to various interested clients.

In simple terms, the product allows the user to upload a variety of investment strategy ideas which are then mapped out visually in a scatter chart. The user then uses various controls and filters to exclude strategies that don’t meet their goal. Desirable strategies can then be compared to each other, viewed individually, saved for later or exported.

Beyond the MVP, plans and designs were left for the client to add additional means of creating strategies within the platform itself, as well as responsive layouts to allow for use on tablets and other touchscreen devices.

I began work on the project just as Moody’s was acquiring the company that had been producing the product suite that this MVP would be part of; Pfaroe. In addition to the project, I reworked the Pfaroe design system, both to bring it up to accessibility standards, to standardise component use across the existing Pfaroe designs and to lay the groundwork for those to transition away from their original look, to one in line with Moody’s branding. This MVP, RiskIntegrity, was the first product to be produced post acquisition, so ended up being a trailblazer for the updated branding and design system approach within the business.