shuchen

Team IBD stakeholders, Business Team, Dev Team, Product Designer, Product Management

My Role User Experience Design, UI Design, Interaction Design, User Research, User Testing

Tool Figma, Adobe Illustrator

Timeline July 2021 - Present

Overview

I joined Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Division, Digital Product team, as a UX/Product Designer in July 2021. My daily work is to design internal business and management tools for IBD internal users. One challenging thing designing at GS is the complex system. Many projects have multiple stakeholders from different departments and groups, making understanding requirements difficult. Another challenge is IBD digital team designs internal tools need to address various policies and rules. Balancing between practical and creative is a tough work. The last challenge is designing with consistency. The design system our team uses has built two years ago which lacks components for diverse projects.

To solve these challenges, I actively communicated and collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders, product managers, and development teams to figure out the project scope, business requirements, and technical limitations. I conducted user research at early stage to understand user pain points, synthesized findings, and visualized ideations through creating user flows, storyboards, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes to propose my potential solution. I used IBD design system to design projects, and contributed to the design system by customizing components which share familiar patterns and consistent interactions to address the expanding needs of different projects.

Highlight Design

Overview

Staffing app is a management platform I’ve designed to help staffers make staffing decisions, formalize the staffing process, and provide an easier way to manage bankers and projects.

For staffers, staffing decisions are based on many criteria, but the information is everywhere. The current assigning process is complex and time-consuming. For bankers, there’s no transparency to understand why they are assigned a project.

Our goal is to provide a tool that helps staffers make decisions assigning bankers to deals and projects with the best and equal opportunities, streamline the assigning process, and manage staffing-related data within one place.

Challenge

• How do we help staffers make staffing decisions that provide the best and equal opportunities for bankers with the least effort?

• How do we help staffers manage staffing-related data within one place?

Result

For the research phase, I collaborated with a designer and product manager, conducted user research sessions interviewing staffers and bankers to understand pain points from different perspectives, synthesized research findings, and discussed with stakeholders and product teams.

For the design phase, I created user flow and low-fi wireframes to propose and test design ideas. I used IBD design system components to build the layout for high-fidelity prototypes over 50 pages and customized a Gantt chart component that didn’t exist in any GS design systems, which has since been consistently utilized in multiple GS projects.

Impact

Staffing has launched on Feb 2021 and received continuous positive feedback from admin and users. Over 200 bankers have used it from different regions and departments. The Gantt chart I created has been adapted by the design system and reused for other projects with similar needs.

Overview

Junior Banker Development(JTD) app is a one-stop Growth Workspace with a starting focus on Junior Bankers that consists of Skills Tracking, Project Preferences, Mentorship, Feedback and Sentiment Gathering.

Junior banker should experience variety of projects, team dynamics before they focus in their field of speciality. However, they don’t have a view into all of their historical projects and express their preferences in one place today. Senior teammates become some of the most important mentors and advocates for a junior banker. But there’s no easy way to track relationship and interaction with teammates for mentorship, feedback and future collaboration.

We want to create a one-stop tool for junior bankers to express preferences, provide equal opportunity for them to work on projects and build career, and help staffers staff projects optimally.

Challenge

• How might we seamlessly guide junior bankers to discover, pursue, and track personally meaningful career pathways?

• How might we provide equal opportunity and allocate junior bankers on projects in an optimal way?

Result

We interviewed junior designers to understand their skill tracking and other career development process, pain points, and goals, synthesized ideas, and asked BUMs(staffers) to pick up the ideas that will most likely help their work process.

For design phase, I conducted low-fidelity design for user testing / co-designing sessions with junior bankers, created hi-fi interactive prototype, customized components by using the design system that share familiar patterns, and conducted QA testing to support development.

If you are interested in staffing and JTD, email me and let's chat about cases and details!