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 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.
Decisions Behind the Design
Every experience, flow and structural choice should directly serve a purpose. The below design decisions were evaluated against core criteria: solving a friction point for the user or driving a measurable business outcome; whether it is reducing investigation time, strengthening audit trails or minimising friction between users. Rather than settling for a visual refresh, the pricing experience replaces a deeply embedded legacy process with a sustainable, long-term solution."
Surfacing decision-making data.
Pain points
Disconnected tools with manual cross-referencing. No reasoning happened inside the tool, but historically happened via email threads.
Decision
Centralised resolutions, with a final verdict being surfaced to the top of the screen for NAV Reviewers to quickly make an informed decision.
Why?
By simply bringing the information required to make a decision removes the need to leave the workflow and dramatically cuts the time to resolve a flagged price.
Contextualizing Real-Time Alerts.
Pain points
Communication lived outside the system, limited real-time visibility, and duplication of effort.
Decision
The dashboard and pricing experience surface what's slipping, not what's already done. As an exception-first dashboard, we introduced clear and effective notifications, giving immediate insight into the context.
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.
Centralizing Investigation & Audit Context
Pain points
Cross-system dependencies, limited real-time visibility and duplication of effort. Users had to open another system, search and rebuild context before returning to the existing screen to make a decision.
Decision
Rather than creating a full page takeover, each exception or price has an associated side drawer which centers the relevant context for the user.
Why?
Bringing pricing details, historical actions and cross-team communication directly alongside the working view eliminates the need for context switching. Users can instantly trace past decisions and attached evidence without duplicating research or interrupting their primary task. To prevent visual overload, filtering functionality was introduced to streamline their search.
The same shared experience, displayed differently.
Pain points
Slow comprehension, duplication of effort and lack of workflow context.
Decision
Surface the same underlying data through distinct, role-tailored interfaces for Preparers and Reviewers. Intentionally adapting the presentation to each role’s specific job-to-be-done accelerates output and reduces operational risk.
Why?
Preparers and Reviewers interact with the same underlying data, but they evaluate it for entirely different outcomes. Preparers require dense, comparative metrics and highlighted breaches to investigate root causes and make initial decisions. Reviewers, by contrast, need immediate visibility into the Preparer’s reasoning, audit trails, and attached evidence to confidently sign off.
*Move the slider
Customizable, Scalable Cards
Pain points
Limited real-time visibility, rigid views and static dashboards that fail to adapt to varying operational priorities across teams.
Decision
Built a modular card framework that allows users to customize their dashboard layout while establishing an extensible architecture for future data components.
Why?
Operational focus shifts throughout the month - a team monitoring exceptions needs fundamentally different visibility than someone resolving trade bottlenecks. Providing customizable module cards gives users control to prioritize the metrics that matter most to their tasks. Crucially, structuring this interface around a modular system creates a scalable design foundation, allowing new data components to be seamlessly introduced as platform capabilities grow without breaking the dashboard experience.
Measuring the Impact
The platform is currently in development. The metrics below are projected targets, grounded in legacy benchmarks, time observations from research and conservative modelling. They form the success criteria we'll measure against post-launch.
Streamlined Exception Triage
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 large 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.
”
Defensible Audit Trails & Compliance Coverage
Designing role-specific views for preparers and reviewers reduces handoff friction. Reviewers gain immediate visibility into underlying calculations and preparer rationale, enabling confident sign-offs without requiring secondary investigation or status check-ins.
“
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 notable reduction in reviewer rework and lift auditable decision coverage 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.
”
Key Takeaways & Reflection
Designing for high-risk workflows is a practice in radical simplification & operational clarity.
Modernizing a compliance-heavy pricing workflow meant peeling back years of entrenched habits, unofficial workarounds, and fragmented tools. Working alongside operational SMEs, preparers, and reviewers provided firsthand visibility into where friction accumulated and where systemic risk was being introduced.
Trust is the primary utility: In complex financial operations, usability isn't measured by visual flair and how good a dashboard looks - it's measured by confidence. Designing transparent audit paths and explicit data validation states will directly reduce user hesitation during critical decision points.
Domain immersion yields sharper trade-offs: Deep-diving into everyday pricing rituals made it easier to challenge assumptions, weigh trade-offs and defend design decisions rooted in operational reality rather than aesthetic preference.
Platforms evolve through implementation: Transitioning designs into active development constantly surfaces new edge cases and nuanced user needs. Treating the platform as an evolving ecosystem ensures the UI stays adaptable as business requirements grow.
What would I do slightly different next time?
In financial operations, the happy path is rare. While routine exceptions are easily automated, high-risk edge cases are where the real operational friction lives. Elevating edge cases into early concepting rather than treating them as secondary states would result in a far more resilient platform architecture.