Overview

Client: UBS Wealth Management Americas

Role: UX Lead, Team Manager, Design Strategist

Timeline: 2015-2017

Team: UX Designers (U.S. + London), Developers (Budapest), Product Owners, Tech Leads

Outcome: Reimagined the ConsultWorks landing page based on user-centered research, reducing time spent on manual tasks and increasing internal adoption and engagement.

Audience: Our primary users were UBS Wealth Management Americas Financial Advisors and their support staff, known as Client Service Associates (CSAs). These professionals rely on streamlined access to information in order to manage portfolios, engage clients, and respond quickly to market changes.

The Challenge

The original ConsultWorks (CW) landing page was outdated, cluttered with redundant marketing, and widely ignored by the people it was meant to serve. Through user research, we discovered that CSAs and Advisors were spending excessive time aggregating "need-to-know" data manually across systems—creating inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Key pain points included:

• No visibility into client proximity to retirement, making proactive outreach difficult

• No alert when clients moved assets into underperforming robo-advisors or self-managed funds

• Lack of visibility into client birthdays, resulting in missed relationship touchpoints

• No simple way to track which clients were affected by portfolio-impacting stock performance

Ultimately, the landing page failed to support Advisors’ daily decision-making needs or time-sensitive tasks.

My Role

Mental Model Map drawn from research interview transcripts

Brainstorming with Product owner and design team

Redesigned landing page (the "after")

Legacy landing page (the "before")

Post-launch feedback from users (1 of 2)

Post-launch feedback from users (2 of 2)

• Directed and conducted user research to uncover pain points and content priorities

• Managed a distributed design team across the U.S. and London

• Partnered closely with a development team in Budapest to ensure feasibility and rapid iteration

• Provided creative direction and cross-functional leadership, aligning product owners, tech leads, and business stakeholders across time zones

The Process

We began by conducting in-depth interviews with Financial Advisors and CSAs to deeply understand what they needed from the landing page—and how they naturally processed and prioritized information.

From this research, we developed a content prioritization matrix with two powerful dimensions:

• Time-based urgency:

  1. Urgent – What advisors need to know first thing in the morning

  2. Weekly – What’s important to track and act on in the next few days

  3. General – Nice-to-know updates or reference material

• Workflow facet:

  1. Know – “What do I need to know today to be informed?”

  2. Act – “What do I need to do now or soon?”

  3. Grow – “What will help me deepen relationships and build my business?”

Cross-referencing Know / Act / Grow against the Urgent / Weekly / General time frames gave us a structured, intuitive blueprint for what content belonged on the landing page—and where it should go.

This framework also became a powerful tool for stakeholder alignment, as it moved discussions away from “whose content gets featured” and toward “what’s actually useful and when.”

In parallel, we addressed other structural issues:

• The landing page was cluttered with redundant marketing, crowding out business-critical tools

• Important features like UBS Radio and market indexes were missing or buried

• There was no centralized governance model for who owned or maintained the page

To address these:

• We led a governance restructuring, advocating for the creation of dedicated teams to manage marketing and research content

• We introduced advanced prototyping to work through technical feasibility with the development team in Budapest before handoff

• We aligned stakeholders from product, tech, and business using the Know/Act/Grow framework as a neutral decision-making lens

This wasn’t just a UX redesign—it was a rethinking of how internal knowledge and external engagement aligned on a single surface.

Results & Impact

The redesign didn’t just improve usability—it fundamentally changed how advisors engaged with the platform.

• A CSA reported that the new landing page would save her ~20 minutes per day by eliminating time spent searching for scattered data

  
  

"I absolutely LOVE the recent ratings/upgrades changes! I had to manually check that twice a day and review vs book query for actual holdings. This will save me a good 20 minutes per day!"

- Laura K, CSA, Boulder CO

• Advisors praised the redesign for reflecting the real rhythm of their day and surfacing the insights they truly cared about

• Client birthday alerts, once considered “too soft” by stakeholders, became one of the most celebrated features post-launch

• Because we involved advisors and CSAs in prototype validation, the final product was met with strong buy-in and high adoption driven by peer enthusiasm

• Development of one of UBS's first design component libraries to expedite future development

Insights & Takeaways

The biggest success wasn’t just the page—it was the teamwork that made it possible. The right people naturally gravitated toward the work: product owners, tech leads, designers, and researchers formed a highly engaged, cross-functional team. We fell into a daily rhythm of quick check-ins and tight feedback loops that kept momentum high and silos low.

• By using user research to advocate for features—like birthday tracking—we were able to overcome internal skepticism and build trust across the business. When advisors saw their feedback directly reflected in the product, they became enthusiastic champions, which made adoption almost effortless.

• This project showed me that inclusive collaboration + user evidence = unstoppable alignment.Real transformation happens when we stop asking users to adapt to our systems—and start building systems that adapt to them.