Case Study
StrategyUX ResearchInteraction Design

TIM — Redesigning a legacy tool

New Homepage

The new homepage for recipients, one of the three audiences I researched and designed for. Also shows the MVP mobile version for contributors.

Challenge

Fix confusing, inefficient workflows in a legacy system that served multiple audiences.

Before
Before the redesign, workflows involved many clicks with slow-loading resources. Some screens were database-centric rather than workflow-centric.

What is TIM?

It’s a platform that creates a network allowing thousands of salespeople at investment banks and brokers to send their trade ideas (like “buy Vodafone because…”) to their clients at hedge funds and pension funds.

The TIM network
The TIM network

Genesis

I put together this journey map to visualise the number of steps in a common workflow. I added typical waiting time at each point.

By showing the unnecessary steps he had to go through, I made the case that rethinking workflows would be necessary in addition to performance optimisations.

The TIM network
Customer Journey

Strategy

Clockwise, from left:

Kickoff workshop with Co-founder, Head of Product, Product Manager, and I.

Excerpt from status update showing how Design Thinking was guiding our Discovery process (the rows represent the five key workflows we identified during research).

As we started to understand the project I put together this proposed plan for the steps it might take to reach a key outcome: "A simplified UI that works for the way people actually use the system".

Strategy

Research & Definition

Research & Definition

Design of first workflow

Design Process

New Flows

Authoring Changes
Flow for sending ideas. This featured three big changes: Removing some fields, calculating investment amounts automatically, and differentiating between fixable and unfixable errors.
Closing wireflow
Flow for closing ideas. Improved on the previous version by reducing clicks, and showing you if an idea was un-closeable rather than letting you try and get into an error state.

Vision

I presented this vision to stakeholders to encourage them to prioritise a future phase. It included nine key outcomes, and wireframes to help visualise the suggested changes.

Vision Presentation

Outcome

  • 70% of authors chose to use the new contribution workflow.
  • Innovations that came out of user observation have been validated by other users, saying “it gives me everything I need to do my job”.
  • The research and design guided us which workflows to move to a new architecture where interactions can complete in ~100ms. This is sharp contrast to the old workflows where actions could take 5+ seconds.
  • We grew new confidence that we could make daring changes to legacy workflows.
  • Account managers now believe “meetings are better when product comes along”. Before, they had been reluctant to take product people to do user research.
Project Output & Definition
New core workflows.
Map
Map of how the new unified UI caters for different personas with overlapping needs. There are three dashboard-like top-level pages focussed on contributing, consuming, or managing. These link to core pages for each entity that can also be accessed via search.