Quant Insight
Quant Insight is a web platform which provides quantitative macro data analytics which helps users enhance their investment process through actionable, evidence based analytics.
Qi has brought together experienced investors, leading academics, cloud computing and machine learning to create a quantitative framework that untangles market complexity. This involves taking large amounts of relevant data, filtering and normalising this data, and then applying rigorous mathematical techniques to identify patterns between asset prices and macro information, taking particular care to avoid overfitting.
Opportunity
I worked with QI across 6 months to redesign their complex financial product, followed by ongoing UX support to both business and engineering.
QI’s existing system was unable to scale and perform as required which resulted in users struggling to grasp the usefulness of the data which was buried under a complex interface. This resulted in the QI team having to manually set up models for users which in turn impacted on business productivity.
Project kickoff
We kicked the project off with initial stakeholder research, a number of their employees were analysts who used the product themselves daily, they were invaluable in helping to scope out their current feature set and identify their key problems. We supported this with primary research, by working closely with their product manager to collect qualitative feedback in the form of user calls and an analytics review.
“I like that once you set it up, it makes it easy to see things you would be most interested in.”
Iteration and validation
From here we were able to define the problem and create a roadmap of research and design starting with user personas and mapping out the new user flows. After getting sign off on the new IA, we moved into design, the whole way through this process we worked closely with QI analysts to ideate on the designs.
We also organised to run a number of design validation calls with existing users to test, and get feedback on the main screens. This was very useful for us as it confirmed that we were going in the right direction with the designs and outlined some areas for refinement within the current site functionality.
“There is so much functionality on Bloomberg thats it’s buried. I’ve used Bloomberg for 20 years and I still discover new stuff to this day. This can show me a very clear regime.”
Development handover
Once we had created the bulk of the UI Design we handed things over to the developers. Working closely with them we were able to iterate on the designs and come up with solutions to any issues that arose during the development process. We were also able to advise here on the analytics implementation, to allow us to continue to analyse the design and receive more quantitative user feedback.