People who leverage Morgan Stanley’s Spending & Budgeting tool are able to categorize transactions and create rules to automate recategorization as they see fit. Initially, the core goal was to work with our development team to bring all associated features in-house since they were owned by a third party service (Yodlee). However, upon auditing these features, we discovered many points of confusion and UX faults that have kept people away from enjoying the full benefits of our tool. So, we took this as an opportunity to fix them.
Summary
Integrating a third party solution typically means less control over the experience. After auditing the current category and rules page, it seemed our product was no exception. Users had a lot of control on paper, but no direction. The UI was cluttered with links and functions that were either not optimized or irrelevant to the main actions users are typically taking.
With this mind, we started building from the foundation. This meant redefining what a category is and isn't, creating new terminology to improve content organization, and solving for all the edge cases we could think of before piloting the experience with our users. Every can of worms we opened yielded another can of worms. And that's only half the story. The transaction rules experience was another skyscraper to climb. But, I'd be lying if I said the complexity wasn't exciting.
Conclusion
Design isn’t always about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, we iterate for the sake of trying to be different than before. This usually isn’t the smartest path to crafting the best experiences for our people. And, occasionally, all you really need is a few key changes to what already exists. Additionally, it goes without saying that the more you can get iterations in front of the real people who will be using the product, the better we can build. That’s something we could have done more of as this project moved along.
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