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Product design · Data viz

Modernizing financial data access for a global manufacturer

I led the effort to modernize how a global corporation's financial division accessed essential data and insights, creating user personas and a human-centered future-state prototype grounded in 50+ employee interviews.

Role

UX research & product design

Timeline

2024

Industry

Global agribusiness

Scope

Finance teams from every part of the organization

Deliverables

9 employee personas
Annotated wireframe
Executive summary

The challenge

Transform how users request, obtain, and use financial data analytics, identifying gaps and informing an employee-centric future-state design.

Approach

I facilitated more than 50 employee interviews to build empathy and understand how different job functions within the financial division access and use data. That research directly informed and shaped nine user personas and the future user experience.

Why a human-centered approach

50%

of a data professional's week is lost searching for, preparing, and re-doing data work instead of analyzing it

36%

of the workday goes to hunting down and consolidating information spread across separate systems

25×

a day the average employee switches between the ~10 apps they rely on to get their job done

Sources: IDC; Asana Anatomy of Work Index. Modernizing data access meant designing around how people already work across systems — not adding one more.

→Gap analysis of the current and desired experience.

→Coordination of 50+ employee interviews globally.

→Understanding how different user accounts use data.

→Discovery of core systemic issues with current data analysis.

Key deliverables

Nine employee personas in a design playbook

Capturing how distinct job functions across the division access and rely on financial data.

Annotated wireframe ready for development

A human-centered future-state design for the analytics experience, specified for hand-off.

Executive summary for leadership buy-in

A concise case for fast implementation, built to secure sponsorship and momentum.

Four of the nine employee personas from the design playbook.

From research to design

Three homes for financial data — one for each way people work with it.

A defining research finding: people across the division needed financial data for very different purposes, but the existing process served it at only one or two levels. We organized the new platform around three distinct areas in the top-level navigation — each one mapped to a need we heard again and again in interviews.

Financial data portal — AOE dashboard, with the three top-level navigation areas highlighted

Reports & KPIs

Data Browser

My Shortcuts

Future-state wireframe — the three areas we added to the platform's primary navigation.

Reports & KPIs

Big Picture Thinker

For the people who work at altitude. The Big Picture Thinker needs to see data and meaning at a higher level — not get into the weeds. This is where they and their teams quickly create, review, and track the financial reports and KPIs they're responsible for.

Data Browser

Precision Expert

For the people who live in the detail. The Precision Expert needed to be granular, but the current state meant emailing around to find who owned the data and could share it. The Data Browser is a true hub and home for organizational financial data — one place to search for and browse everything being collected.

My Shortcuts

Shared across personas

In interview after interview, people described the daily energy spent tracking down data and remembering where it lives. My Shortcuts lets reports and raw data files alike be pinned in one place, keeping the information people reference most a single click away.

"The team brought great ideas and sparked smart conversations. They were able to put all the ideas we discussed into the final deliverable. Overall, great work!"

Executive sponsor

Result

By grounding the design in how employees actually work, we gave the client a clear path forward. I led stakeholders through ideation and design and delivered a wireframe the team took straight into development. This work mobilized implementation on a global scale to equip teams with the data to deliver business results, enable global collaboration, and support long-term growth and engagement.

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