SEI Investments is a financial firm providing investment processing, investment management, and investment operations solutions. They set out to modernize their advisory applications — and needed an envisioning partner to define what a greenfield platform should even be.
Greenfield is a harder brief than it sounds. There was no existing product to critique, no analytics to read, no support queue to mine. What existed instead was a room of stakeholders who each held a different version of the platform in their head, and three months to turn that into something an engineering team could cost and build.
The risk in an envisioning engagement isn’t designing the wrong screens. It’s delivering something inspiring that nobody can build.
The Approach
As UX Design Consultant, I partnered with a business analyst and another designer for three months on the MM&T (Model Management & Trading) platform and Client Portal. Rather than treat requirements-gathering and design as sequential phases, we used design sprints as the requirements-capture engine — the workshop that surfaced the requirement and the artefact that resolved it were the same session.
That gave us a way to build shared understanding faster than a document could: proto-personas to anchor who we were designing for, a journey map on the wall to fix the sequence of the work, and only then screens. The whole thing was integrated with SEI’s prior Client Acquisition & Review (CAR) work rather than layered on top of it — so the output extended a platform instead of starting a second one.
With no product to study, the fastest route to a requirement was to design against it in the room. Sprints collapsed elicitation and design into one loop — stakeholders saw the consequence of a requirement the same day they voiced it, which is when they were still willing to change it.
Proto-personas rather than no personas
There was no budget or timeline for generative research. Proto-personas — explicitly grounded in the team’s experience and assumptions — gave every design decision a person to answer to, and made those assumptions visible enough to be argued with instead of silently baked in.
The journey before the screens
We built the product journey on the wall before drawing a single screen. Fixing the phases and the user’s experience at each step first meant screen design became a question of execution rather than a place where the flow got quietly re-invented.
Integrate with CAR, don’t layer over it
SEI had already invested in Client Acquisition & Review. Treating MM&T as an extension of that work — same visual language, continuous IA — meant advisors would experience one platform rather than two products that happened to share a login.
The end client as a first-class user
The Client Portal could have been a report-delivery mechanism bolted to the advisor tool. Designing the end client as a user in their own right — with their own journey and their own view of their money — turned the portal from an export surface into the second half of the platform.
Research & Explorations
Proto-personas
To empathize with the different types of users, we developed proto-personas — grounded in the team’s experience and assumptions — to give every design decision a person to answer to.
1 / 3Proto-personas
User journey
A product-based journey map — built out on the wall through design sprints — helped us understand the course phases, the user, and their experience at each step, so we designed the flow before we designed a single screen.
1 / 5User journey
Page Structure
The research resolved into a page-structure map — the information architecture spine of the platform. It made the engagement buildable instead of inspirational: every page accounted for before a line of code.
1 / 5Page structure & screens
Client Portal
A portal that treats the end client as a first-class user rather than a report recipient — the counterpart to the advisor’s MM&T platform.
1 / 2Client Portal
Proposal Analytics
Analytics that turn a proposal into a decision — surfacing the numbers advisors and clients need to move forward.
Proposal Analytics in motion
Outcome
3 mofrom ambiguity to a buildable blueprint — envisioning delivered on schedule
2greenfield platforms defined — MM&T for advisors, Client Portal for their clients
1complete page-structure map — the IA spine for further development
+CARintegrated with SEI’s prior Client Acquisition & Review UX, not layered over it
The engagement established the visual language and information architecture SEI’s teams carried into development — asset allocation and selection screens, review-and-implement workflows, and a client portal that treated the end client as a first-class user rather than a report recipient.
