Resolving the Outliers
Overview:
Designing a centralised pricing experience within the NAV lifecycle to cut exception resolution time by ~60% and shift vendor and client communication into a single, auditable workspace.
Role:
Lead Designer
Team:
Product Lead, Business Analyst, Development, Fund Accountant SMEs.
Before we begin
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and modified confidential information in this case study.
Project Overview
~60%
Reduction in exception resolution time
Based on workflow analysis and user estimation
Communication consolidated
Single auditable workflow replacing email chains
Pricing lifecycle visibility
Real-time SLA and breach concentration tracking
Duplicated effort remove
Shared investigative context across preparers and reviewers
Legacy tooling dependency eliminated
Centralised workspace replaced 5–7 disconnected systems
The Problem
Pricing Wasn't Broken. The Workflow Around It Was.
The brief was deceptively simple: "Bring pricing into the new platform". After speaking with users, the real problem became clear: "Stop making me leave my workflow to do my job."
Most prices passed automated checks without issue. The bottleneck lived entirely in exceptions - prices that failed validation and demanded investigation under strict daily deadlines. Every disconnected system introduced friction. Every interruption introduced risk.
This wasn't a usability issue in isolation. Unresolved exceptions threatened:
NAV publication delays
Missed deadlines with direct client and regulatory impact
Audit and compliance risk
Decision reasoning lost outside the system, in email
Operational trust
Duplicated effort and late visibility eroded team confidence
Research & Discovery
Understanding Where the Workflow Actually Broke
To find where friction truly existed, I conducted contextual interviews with NAV Preparers, NAV Reviewers and Market Data Analysts, shadowed legacy tooling in use, and analysed pricing files, challenge emails, audit logs and exception reports alongside collaborative sessions with operational SMEs.
Rather than cataloguing interface issues, the research focused on how decisions were made, where trust broke down, how teams prioritised under pressure and where delays accumulated.
Legacy Tooling;
What Was Broken?
To find where friction truly existed, I conducted contextual interviews with NAV Preparers, NAV Reviewers and Market Data Analysts, shadowed legacy tooling in use, and analysed pricing files, challenge emails, audit logs and exception reports alongside collaborative sessions with operational SMEs.
Rather than cataloguing interface issues, the research focused on how decisions were made, where trust broke down, how teams prioritised under pressure and where delays accumulated.
⚠️
Fragmentation across systems
Preparers regularly moved between various systems to resolve a single out-of-tolerance price: a pricing system → vendor terminals → internal monitoring tools → Excel trackers → email threads → shared drives → historical references. Users developed personal triage rituals to compensate. Excel became the unofficial operating system.
📉
The legacy system punished curiosity
Investigating a flagged price meant leaving the current screen, opening another system, searching for the security, cross-referencing sources, returning to the workflow, rebuilding context and then making a decision. The cost of a single investigation became high enough that users developed shortcuts. In fund administration, shortcuts become risk.
📧
Communication lived outside the system
Vendor challenges, client conversations and reviewer reasoning happened almost entirely through email. The platform recorded outcomes - but not the decision-making behind them. Reconstructing the rationale for a pricing decision weeks or months later was difficult and unreliable.
🔄
Duplication of effort across roles
This was the single largest source of wasted time. A preparer would fully research a pricing issue and document their conclusions externally. The reviewer would then repeat the same investigation from scratch - because none of that reasoning existed inside the workflow.
🔍
Limited real-time visibility
Teams had no real-time view into breach concentration, ageing exceptions, SLA risk or outstanding approvals. Problems surfaced only once deadlines were already under threat.
Framing The Opportunity
Users didn't need another pricing screen. They needed operational continuity.
Before
Fragmented. Manual. Hard to trust.
5–7 systems to resolve a single exception
Reasoning lived in email threads
Duplicated investigation from scratch
No shared visibility of breach concentration
After
Connected. Continuous. Trustworthy.
Single workspace from investigation to resolution
Decisions embedded in-system
Shared context across all stakeholders
Real-time pricing readiness and SLA visibility
Exception first, not data first.
Surface what requires attention - not what already passed.
Keep users in flow.
Users should never need to leave the workflow to investigate or resolve.
Decisions should persist.
Reasoning stays attached to the exception - not lost in external tools.
Design Process
Journey Mapping
We decided to drill into one specific use case, which focused on an out of tolerance price. This process was focused around the NAV Preparer, with escalations and input to the NAV Reviewer and Market Data Analyst. Maps based on legacy systems exposed repeated investigation loops, excessive context switching, communication gaps, approval bottlenecks and visibility failures. Future-state journey maps were then created aligned to the new platform and workflow engine.
Low Fidelity Exploration
Early wireframes focused heavily on information hierarchy, exception triage flows, table interaction patterns, investigation continuity and multi-role operational states. Because the workflow was data-dense and operationally critical, structure mattered more than visual polish at this stage.
💡
The goal wasn't to create screens. It was to create flow efficiency.
Continuous Collaborative Validation
Rather than treating testing as a formal end-stage activity, design evolved through iterative working sessions with SMEs, operations users, product managers, engineers and stakeholders. We validated workflow assumptions, terminology, prioritisation logic, exception handling behaviour and escalation states directly within those sessions - significantly reducing downstream rework.
Polishing the Pixels
With the core workflows validated, the focus shifted into high-fidelity design - refining the product into something that behaved like real operational platform, not a static concept.
Key High Fidelity Enhancements:
Configurable monitoring dashboard with drag-and-drop widget arrangement, ageing chips and lifecycle-wide visibility.
Status badges and breach indicators (Open, For Review, Resolved, Auto Passed) for instant visual assessment of an exception's state.
Alternative pricing tables with pre-calculated price differences, market value impact and one-click "Adopt as Primary".
Restrained use of alert colour - warning highlighting reserved exclusively for breach rows so the signal lands.
Side-out detail panel carrying security identifiers, history, files and comments without losing the user's place in the table.
Leading with Insight
Each design decision was intentionally mapped to a specific user and business pain point: reducing investigation time, strengthening audit trails, increasing trust in vendor data and minimising friction between preparers, reviewers and clients. The pricing experience was designed not just as a new screen, but as a long-term replacement for a deeply embedded legacy process.
Designed as a Single Pricing Workspace.
Pain points — Fragmented pricing tools, manual cross-referencing, low confidence in vendor data.
Decision — Centralised exceptions, alternative sources, market value impact and ownership into one workspace.
Why? — Users need confidence, not just access. Bringing every relevant data point to the point of decision removes the need to leave the workflow and dramatically cuts the time to resolve a flagged price.
Exception-First, Not Data-First.
Pain points — Late discovery of breaches, reactive firefighting, NAV slippage.
Decision — The dashboard and pricing landing page surface what's slipping, not what's done.
Why? — In practice, users don't need to look at every priced security — they need to know which ones broke. Foregrounding exceptions, ageing and SLA risk shifts the experience from reactive to proactive.
Communication Inside the System.
Pain points — Vendor challenges and client queries lost in email, undocumented reasoning, fragile audit trails.
Decision — Resolution comments, vendor challenge actions, client challenge tagging and approval reasoning all live within the security record.
Why? — The system of record now captures both the outcome and the rationale, strengthening audit position and removing the need for reviewers to re-investigate the preparer's work.
One Shared Experience for Preparers and Reviewers.
Pain points — Duplicated investigation, unclear ownership, role-based tool fragmentation.
Decision — A single experience that adapts its actions to role — preparer sees Challenge / Adopt / Tag, reviewer sees Approve / Reject — both reading from the same data and history.
Why? — Reviewers inherit the preparer's reasoning rather than rebuilding it from scratch, improving handoff speed and decision confidence.
Reduced Cognitive Load Through Strong Hierarchy and Progressive Disclosure.
Pain points — Information overload, slow comprehension, fatigue under SLA pressure.
Decision — High-level status and counts surfaced first, with detail panels and drill-downs available on demand.
Why? — Keeps the experience calm during high-pressure moments, while still supporting deep investigation when a price genuinely warrants it.
Designed for Long-Term Replacement and Scale.
The same data, designed with intention.
Measuring the Impact
The platform is currently in development. The metrics below are projected targets, grounded in legacy benchmarks, time-and-motion observations from research and conservative modelling. They form the success criteria we'll measure against post-launch.
Measurable Efficiency & Operational Simplification
The redesigned pricing experience is projected to deliver a ~60% reduction in time to resolve an out-of-tolerance exception, driven by single-screen investigation, one-click source adoption and an estimated ~70% shift in vendor and client communication from email into the platform.
“
Even at first glance, you can tell where the work is. Everything I'd normally have to dig for is right there on the screen.
”
Intuitive Navigation & Faster Decision-Making
In early walkthroughs, participants consistently demonstrated a clear understanding of navigation and next steps with no prior exposure. Reviewers were able to locate the preparer's reasoning, assess the proposed price change and approve or reject with confidence, validating the maker-checker structure.
“
The reviewer screen is the bit I love. I don't have to ask anyone what they were thinking — it's all sitting there.
”
Reduced Friction Through Transparency & Traceability
The platform is expected to deliver a ~68% reduction in reviewer rework and lift auditable decision coverage from ~40% to ~95% by capturing every comment, challenge and file attachment against the security itself, removing reliance on email and side-channel notes.
“
Right now, half my audit prep is hunting through inboxes. If the conversation lives next to the price, that problem just disappears
”
A Step Change in the Pricing Experience
When compared to the legacy pricing tools, participants described the proposed experience as a meaningful shift — particularly in how breaches, ageing and upstream context are surfaced. The experience moves pricing from reactive and fragmented to proactive, transparent and defensible.
“
Today I'd have four tabs open to do what this screen does in one. That's the difference.
”
Reflections
The project presented a familiar challenge in an unfamiliar shape: translating a dense, exception-driven, regulation-bound process (the pricing stage of the NAV lifecycle), into an intuitive and defensible digital experience.
Designing this experience was as much about restraint as it was about invention. Through close collaboration with SMEs, preparers and reviewers, I built a strong understanding of the day-to-day reality of pricing — the small frustrations, the institutional shortcuts, the moments of genuine risk — and let those shape the design at every level. Compromises were made, opinions were challenged, and the strongest decisions were the ones we returned to and questioned multiple times. Watching the prototype move from grooming sessions into active development confirmed the value of pairing deep domain immersion with iterative design. It also reinforced something I keep relearning: in workflows like this, the design isn't trying to look impressive — it's trying to feel honest. If the user trusts what they see, the work gets done faster, more confidently and with a better audit trail behind it.
While the experience has reached high-fidelity prototype and is now in development, designs of this scale are never truly "final". As implementation progresses, new edge cases, asset classes and user behaviours will surface, and the experience will continue to evolve in stride. This is the part of the work I'm most looking forward to — seeing it land in real users' hands and refining it from there.