Overview

Designed and shipped a fully functional MVP that uncovers hidden investment fees using a secure Plaid integration

MagniFee is a fully responsive fintech tool that calculates the true cost of portfolio management—revealing the layers of fees most investors never see. As the sole UX designer, I partnered directly with the CEO to transform a raw concept into a launched MVP within ten weeks, initially supporting Charles Schwab accounts and later extending it to work with Fidelity through a reusable institution-selection pattern. The product is live and has generated over 750 site hits with no formal marketing.

Project Goals

Bring clarity to complex financial data in a secure, advisor-friendly flow

1. Reveal “known” + “hidden” fees in a single, digestible view
2. Build trust with a familiar, secure Plaid connection
3. Deliver a mobile-first experience that feels safe and effortless
4. Enable advisors to demo value in real time during prospect meetings
5. Launch fast without compromising accuracy

User Research

Time consuming, manual process

The user researchers at g2o employed interactive sessions and qualitative research methods to highlight the pain points of the internal employees dealing with the M&A deals, who are the target audience for this MVP. The employees were nervous during deals and had trouble in communicating with 100s of shareholders and monitoring the deal. Below is a journey map depicting the existing Solicitation Agent process at Wilmington Trust.

Approach

Agile Project Management

The project is managed using Agile methodology i.e. breaking it up into several phases / releases. The aim is to deliver the right product, with incremental and frequent delivery of small chunks of functionality. The team worked in 2-week sprints with scrum ceremonies like daily standup updates, product backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review and retrospective sessions. This includes cross-functional teams collaboration, frequent customer feedback and course correction as needed.

Product Development Process

A lengthy yet successful model

Below is the overall product development process that was created by the team and followed by them. This helped in making sure that we are covering every important step in the product development cycle. This also helped in cultivating a healthy team spirit and collaboration.

Workflow

From 50,000 ft to a 10,000 ft view of the Solicitation Agent process

We first started with drafting a 50,000 ft view of the internal user flow documenting the creation of a deal, collection of documents, distribution of documents and monitoring of a deal. This was the outcome of several discussions with the PO, a few business SMEs, UX Designers and tech leads. It helped us in understanding the bigger picture and then went on to focus on creating a 10,000 ft view, concentrating on the internal users’ workflow as per the release plan for MVP1.

Screen Flow

5,000 ft view of the internal users’ workflow

This exercise helped us in understanding some of the details and nuanced use cases / user stories for this MVP and connection with third party applications like DocuSign.

Site Map

The constantly changing North Star!

Given the complexity of the problem we were trying to solve, our information architecture was bound to change after every few sessions. But having one in the first place really help in navigating through every design and tech discussion we had.

Low-fi Wireframes

Multiple iterations to make the web portal customizable

Such wireframes helped in quickly creating multiple iterations of the MVP based on the Business SME’s pain points and having meaningful discussions around them with the PO, BA, and the Tech Lead. The designs became clearer after every set of iterations. These sessions were focused on finding a smarter way of doing things and making sure that the designs are flexible when it’s time to release to the client counsel and also customizable when other Wilmington Trust applications are connected to DSR in the future.

Hi-fi Wireframes

Perfecting the user flow in the process

The hi-fidelity wireframes were not a refined version of the low-fidelity for every use case. They helped the team in discovering intricacies that had been missed out on in earlier discussions leading to further discussions to perfect the user flow.

Detailed User flows

Mapping user stories to the flow

I worked on the detailed user flows simultaneously with the hi-fidelity wireframes, once we had more clarity. I collaborated with the BA in mapping the Jira story numbers to their corresponding user flows. This helped in creating screens for certain use cases that we may have missed earlier and also helped in tracking the story inventory for a particular sprint.

Design Review

UX sign off before testing in Cert

This MVP was released internally in December 2021 and has reduced the average time for each deal by 40 minutes. Time is money. Every minute saved can be used to engage in more deals and thereby increase the Trust’s business. This portal when established in the market is estimated to make a profit in millions of dollars.

Impact

Time is Money

This MVP was released internally in December 2021 and has reduced the average time for each deal by 40 minutes. Every minute saved can be used to engage in more deals and thereby increase the Trust’s business. This portal when established in the market is estimated to make a profit of millions of dollars.

Learnings and Takeaways

Communication with business and technology partners

This was my first time in an agile team with so many team members. During my partnering with the PO, BA and tech team, I realized that every party had their own language of communicating the same thing and it is so important to acknowledge that and bridge the gap.

Balancing the big picture vs feeding the development engine

There was a time when I had lost my way while trying to balance too much. I had to make sure that I do not forget the big picture while also having my designs ready for the next sprint. I worked on this gradually and got better at it with some help from my Senior Designer and PO.