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Digital Product with Morgan Stanley

With over 70,000 employees, the firm relies on custom-built software to meet its diverse operational needs. By working efficiently and effectively, I was able to deliver new designs at twice the expected pace. Communication is one of my super powers and it allowed me to bridge the gap between business and development using design, ensuring that business had its needs exceeded with as little development effort as possible. As a result, I built strong relationships with stakeholders who valued my ability to interpret their needs and design applications that were built quickly and for a low cost.

The travel app was one of the most frustrating applications that the firm's employees relied upon. After my research and redesign, we found a 75% reduction in users who reported the application to be a "major source of frustration" in surveys.

One of my most challenging projects was redesigning the corporate travel application, which had earned a reputation as one of the firm’s most frustrating tools. Users found it difficult to navigate due to confusing jargon and poor usability. Our team was tasked with a complete overhaul, but the process was met with resistance from the internal travel department, which had owned the tool for years. They were hesitant to implement changes despite clear usability issues. Through extensive user research, careful negotiation, and patience, we presented a solution backed by data that addressed user pain points. Ultimately, the redesigned application was met with widespread praise and significantly reducing overhead and frustration.

For the firm's travel booking application, I designed a flow that integrated the flight, hotel, and car bookings into one trip planner. This integrated workflow helped us to save users up to 60% of the time they were spending manging and making their bookings, working out to thousands of hours of employee effort saved across the firm.

Another major project was the redesign of the corporate directory, one of the firm's most frequently used internal tools. This application required careful consideration, as it served a broad audience and contained extensive functionality. I conducted user workshops to identify opportunities, worked closely with stakeholders on complex business politics, collaborated with developers to optimize implementation, and partnered with the design systems team to reduce lift. Balancing existing user behaviors with new enhancements was a key challenge, but we developed a thoughtful transition strategy that tested exceedingly well with employees and was praised by stakeholders.

The corporate directory is the most used application by employees at the firm. This redesign adapted insights from my research and used prebuilt components from the firm's design system to improve the access of, and search for critical information on users profiles. This ultimately improves collaboration across an 80,000 person firm.

Records management is a critical yet often overlooked function within the firm. With billions of records tracking leads, investments, users, and partners, managing data effectively is essential for cost control and operational efficiency. The Records Management Disposition team needed a tool to help them streamline the process of identifying and handling outdated or unnecessary records. I delivered an intuitive application that simplified their workflow and resulted in significant cost savings for the firm.

This peace of a flow diagram was the result of over 15 conversations with more then 25 users across 5 groups within the firm. During the discovery, members of the groups found operational inefficiencies beyond the original scope of the redesign and the final document was shared with over 200 members of the iDiligence team. It was lauded as the most useful insights document of the redesign project.

One of the most complex projects I worked on was the business vetting application. The firm's vetting process required global teams to assess the financial and ethical integrity of businesses and their associates. This involved tracing relationships between individuals and entities, sometimes spanning multiple layers of connections. Designing an application to support this intricate research process was a challenge, but by leveraging the firm's design system and pre-built components, I created a solution that was both powerful and easy to implement. The result was a highly effective tool that simplified collaboration for researchers while maintaining the rigor required for due diligence.

Research is only useful in how it informs the product design. This sample from a much larger summery deck helped to reduce the training necessary while expanding the scope of a vetting application process used across multiple regions in the firm.

Throughout my tenure, I consistently delivered high-impact design solutions, strengthened cross-functional communication, and improved critical business applications. My ability to navigate complex workflows, advocate for users, design developer friendly applications, and collaborate across teams allowed me to drive meaningful improvements in the firm’s internal software ecosystem reducing effort across the firm by as much as 20%.

I was able to reduce the cost of development by 20% while retain the same feature set by working with the external development team and adjusting the components and template system for the travel application to better leverage existing systems. Here we see some of the components from the new proposed system.