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Corporates Homepage

An updated homepage, bringing everything our users care about to the forefront.

Overview

What was the project?

ChathamDirect is a financial platform used by corporate clients to manage their balance sheet and cash flow foreign currency risk, and execute FX trades. The original homepage was outdated, had no real useful data, and made it difficult for users to quickly assess and manage their financial risk.

The project goal was to redesign the homepage to improve information hierarchy, surface key metrics, and provide a clear path to core tasks. We wanted to do this in a way that would make it useful for a variety of personas, from analysts to CFOs. During the design process there was close collaboration between myself (UX Design), UX Research, SMEs, and our Product Manager.

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Throughout the project we anchored to a few core themes:

  • Show me what I need to do today

  • Give our users information that makes them want to log in daily

  • Tie the entire system together

  • Help users be more efficient

My Role

Design Lead

  • Led user research and usability testing, working with a Junior UX Researcher

  • Created wireframes in Miro and high-fidelity prototypes in Axure

  • Facilitated design critiques and stakeholder reviews

  • Collaborated daily with product and engineering to align on scope and interactions

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Discovery and Research

We Conducted:

  • 6 user interviews (Implementations, Client Relationship Managers, Treasury Advisors)

  • Sent 10 surveys to an additional subject matter experts

  • Heuristic evaluation of the existing homepage

  • Qualitative and quantitative data using Google Analytics

  • Competitive analysis of other B2B fintech dashboards

Artifacts:

Interview and Survey Questions

List of Interviewees

Data Analytics​​​

Competitor Dashboards

Interview Data Analysis

Key Insights:

  • Users log in with a clear intent (e.g. check cash balance, execute FX trade)

  • They want a snapshot view of their portfolio

  • The existing data had very little key data

  • Users typically needed to drill into 4+ pages to get to the action they needed

  • Multiple other pages were showing as landing pages, leading to the assumption users had other pages bookmarked rather than navigating through the homepage

  • Current data catered to only one user group

User Groups and Jobs Identified:

  • Senior Treasury

    • Jobs: Understand exposure and hedge summary, see trading activity, do a completeness check, be able to export data, and see if there are any errors or issues.

  • Treasury Group (Asst. Treasurer, Operations, an Analysts)

    • Jobs: View market rates, see trading activity, run reports, see exposure and hedge activity and see if there are any errors or issues.​

  • Middle / Back Office

    • Jobs: View trade activity, run reports, and search for transactions​

  • Accounting

    • Jobs: Quickly navigate to Accounting Dashboard, see notifications and errors, view trade activity, run reports, view counterparty portfolio (current homepage), and navigate to Period-end Checklist

  • Support

    • Jobs: Search transactions, and view when API tokens expire​

Artifacts:

Breakdown by User Groups

Ideation and Design

Ideation:

  • Identified 8 areas to focus on, ranking them by importance:

    • Market Data​

    • Trade/Hedge Activity

    • Exposure Activity

    • Notifications and Errors

    • Navigation

    • Reporting

    • Carry over of current functionality

    • Period-end Checklist

  • Created initial low fidelity concepts for each of the areas​

  • Gathered feedback from product and subject matter experts

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Artifacts:

Inspiration

Ideation by Job

Design:

  • Turned wireframes into a functional prototype using Axure​

  • Tested and iterated on prototype with SMEs

    • We did not have access to clients for testing​

  • ​Shared prototype with stakeholders

  • Gathered feedback from a user group, consisting of 10+ clients

  • Broke the prototype into the the different development phases

Artifacts:

homepage gif.gif

Final Design

Phase 3

Phase 2

MVP (to be built by dev interns)

Results

Impact:

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  • +800% increase in average session time

    • ​Previous page was < 1min with current avg. time being 8m 45sec​​

  • After 2 years in production usage is still increasing since last year:

    • Omni-uploader button up +6%​

    • Add Report up +166%

    • Trade table interaction +85%

    • Quick Links interaction +92%

  • The only negative we found is that users are not interested in looking at the News tab

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Reflection

Lessons Learned:

  • Prioritization of what to build (phases) is important

    • Although we had initial plans to build out 3+ phases, priorities changed and we never revisited the project after phase one​

  • Nothing can truly replace being able to talk to actual users

    • We originally had intentions of adding mobile specific features but during our user group session, we learned that all of the clients we spoke will never access their company data on mobile devices, mainly due to security reason​​

  • Spending sufficient time doing research speeds up and helps focus the design process​

© 2025 by Steve Reiser - Created using wix.com

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