Redesigning a Legacy Institutional Platform
An outdated digital experience was holding back a leading financial brand’s institutional sales platform. We led a full redesign to bring it into the modern era—elevating usability, aligning with brand evolution, and empowering consultants with a smoother sales journey. The result? Doubled traffic and renewed trust in the platform.
The Project
Client: Major Canadian Financial Institution
Timeline: 12 months (6 months research and scope definition; 6 months implementation)
Role: UX Designer & Business Analyst
Tools: Adobe XD, Axure, Jira, PowerPoint, Optimal Workshop
Team & Collaboration
Co-located cross-functional team:
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1 UX and 2 UI Designers
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1 Product Owner
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2 Business Analysts
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Developers, QA Testers, and Scrum Masters
I helped facilitate weekly syncs with stakeholders across business, marketing, and content to drive alignment and gather continuous feedback.
The Challenge
The client had significantly expanded its investment offerings, but its client-facing web platform—central to both user experience and brand perception—had not been updated since 2005. The outdated interface and structure no longer accurately reflected the organization’s scale, professionalism, or innovation, resulting in reduced trust and credibility.
Key challenges :
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Off-brand direction: Stakeholders pushed for a full visual rebrand that didn’t align with corporate guidelines.
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Outdated structure: Poor labels, broken links, and outdated content made navigation confusing and maintenance difficult.
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Unaligned content: A recent acquisition required alignment on messaging, ownership, and delivery of a unified experience.
We introduced design practices to:
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Stakeholder education: Educate stakeholders on the value of the company design system to implement it effectively, reduce costs, ensure consistency, and accelerate future iterations.
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Content structure: Apply structured content rules aligned with brand and marketing guidelines.
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Reusable components: Build accessible, reusable components to improve delivery and user experience.
Approach
Phase 1 – Research & Planning
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Business & user insights: Conducted interviews with stakeholders and finance consultants to understand the organizational structure, user roles, and how the site supported daily operations. These insights informed the creation of user personas and journey maps, capturing key needs, behaviours, and pain points across the experience.
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Competitive analysis: Researched local and global peer organizations and delivered benchmarking and heuristic evaluations to identify content trends and communication strategies, helping position the platform within a competitive context.
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Analytics review: Analyzed traffic patterns, click behaviour, and file downloads to uncover usage patterns and inform a new sitemap and navigation strategy tailored to user priorities.
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Usability testing: Facilitated task-based validation sessions to assess content groupings and interaction logic, providing evidence to support updates in structure and labelling.
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Scope definition: Partnered with the PO, business analysts, and frontend developers to define scope, align priorities, and estimate delivery effort using story mapping and feature categorization.
Phase 2 – Design & Implementation
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Wireframe development: Created concepts from sketches and high-fidelity wireframes to explore layout options and functionality. Presented them in phases to stakeholders for structured feedback and approval.
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Visual alignment: Collaborated with a visual designer to align the final UI with brand guidelines, leveraging the enterprise component library and designing custom elements where needed.
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Accessibility improvements: Led accessibility reviews and testing to identify usability barriers. Worked closely with QA and developers to fix issues such as a card overlay trapping screen reader users in a loop—then contributed updates back to the enterprise design system.
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User testing: Facilitated User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to assess navigation, content findability, and overall experience across user flows.
Ideation & Storymapping
Ideation Sketches
Page Architecture & UX Flow
Wireframes
Cons & pros of using the filtering component
The Solution
The redesigned portal delivered a bold and modern experience that better reflected the organization’s scale, credibility, and financial expertise. It increased engagement, strengthened client trust, and helped position the business more competitively in the investment market.
The platform continues to evolve with user needs. As the enterprise design system expands, it maintains a strong balance between brand consistency and usability across new components and features.
