Pharos
Finance
AI-powered predictive risk management
AI-powered predictive risk management
The Pharos Client was a large bank in the U.S. They wanted to expand the services they provide to financial advisors.
After a research and concept ideation sprint, the client chose the Pharos concept to move forward to product definition.
CROs and CIOs need to constantly assess the news for potential impact on the portfolios they manage. For example, an outbreak of Zika Virus near a textile plant that provides socks for Nike could have an impact on that stock. With so many possible news sources and orders of impact, anticipating exposure to risk is an overwhelming task.
The solution was Pharos, a new interface for risk professionals to scan and dive deep into information from thousands of external and internal sources (e.g. sell-side, buy-side, social media, news). Pharos summarizes reports from risk analysis sources sources, news feeds and online articles to contextualize the impact of new information on a portfolio. In essence, Pharos reads the news for a CRO/CIO and calculates possible exposure for stocks.
The goal of the project was define the features and create a proof of concept that Pharos could work. To start, we needed to create an interface that would make intuitive sense to a busy professional.
To create an intuitive interface, I sketched several different interaction models.
The UI sketch above shows how the user could access the affected portfolio while reading a news article. Swiping left or right would show the next article related to the stock.
The lead designer and I referred to the sketch above as "The Sentence." The concept here was that the user could read the connections between articles and investments from top to bottom in a natural language format. You can see how the pencil sketches turned into a UI.
The user flow was designed around vertical and horizontal scrolling. Scrolling vertically would allow the user to probe deeper into a topic while scrolling to the left or right would show adjacent content.
Once the interaction model and user flow was determined, I created the UI designs that would go into the final prototype. The visual style was based in part on the client's branding.
This video shows a click-through of the prototype I built in Principle for the MVP version of Pharos.
The video below shows the prototype flow we demonstrated at our final product definition meeting.
The way an interface moves, responds, its layout, the transitions between screens - all of these choices affect the user. When I understood that CROs need to get to the heart of information fast - I was able to design Pharos in a way that met their needs.