Designing an Investment Hub

Project Overview

The Athena dashboard was designed to solve a critical problem: users with multiple investment accounts lacked a clear, centralized way to see how they were doing. While each account had its own view, there was no holistic portfolio-level experience. Our goal was to create a dashboard that quickly communicated overall performance, surfaced potential issues, and connected users to deeper insights—all without overwhelming them.

Problem Users managing assets across various institutions had to click into each individual account to view performance, diversification, or health. They struggled to:

• Understand their portfolio at a glance

• Identify which accounts needed attention

• See how their unmanaged accounts compared to a managed alternative

Scope & Goals

• Provide a single, high-level snapshot of total portfolio performance

• Highlight account-level issues without requiring users to dig for them

• Seamlessly link out to deeper insights, including account health and comparison views

Design Challenges

1. Fragmented architecture: The product had originally been built with isolated account views, not as a portfolio-level platform.

2. Cognitive load: Users varied widely in financial literacy; the dashboard needed to work for both sophisticated investors and novices.

3. Engagement falloff: Previous data-heavy views caused users to skim or bounce rather than drill down.

Exploration & Iteration We began by auditing what data was available and what users actually cared about. Initial explorations grouped accounts in cards, with inline details for each one. This quickly became noisy and hard to scan. Instead, we moved toward a layout with a clear top-level summary, followed by contextual account tiles.

Key Iterations

• Early Version: Cards showed balance and growth for each account, but nothing rolled up at the portfolio level. Users missed the big picture.

• Mid Iteration: Added a summary bar with total balance, % gain/loss, and an alert badge showing how many accounts needed review.

• Final Layout: Modular layout with three key sections: Portfolio Summary, Attention Needed (accounts with low health scores), and All Accounts.

Design Solutions

• Portfolio Summary: Displayed total balance, recent growth trend, and a single status label (e.g., "Portfolio On Track") to anchor interpretation.

• Health Alerts: Surfaced only the accounts that needed action, ranked by severity—making it easy to triage.

• Inline Navigation: Each account tile linked directly to the most relevant view: health insights, fee breakdown, or diversification comparison.

User Feedback

• "I used to just look at one account and ignore the rest. Now I know where I need to pay attention."

• "The dashboard tells me if something’s wrong without making me figure it out myself."

Impact

• Increased click-through to account health by 3.2x

• 22% higher conversion rate to managed accounts from users who interacted with dashboard alerts

• Reduced average time to insight (from login to action taken) by 47%