Background

Global Research Management needed a centralized way to track analyst activity, client engagement, product readership, and interaction time across regions and business functions. There was no single source of truth. Data was scattered across four separate legacy systems that couldn't talk to each other.

As Principal Design Lead, I took on the challenge of building the centralized reporting infrastructure to measure the research department's own performance. Working closely with the data and engineering team, I led UX across the full dashboard suite, running regular requirements workshops and producing the mockups and interaction guidance that drove the build.

High level wins

Platform unification

Consolidated four disconnected legacy reporting systems into a single unified platform.

Process automation

Replaced repetitive manual reporting burden with real-time, self-serve analytics and instant data access.

Depth and analytics flexibiliy

Historical trends, YoY comparisons, and flexible filtering across sectors, analysts, accounts, tiers, and regions.

Leading the work

Three stakeholder leads were the center of gravity for the entire project. They sat between the business and the data. They knew exactly what the department heads needed to see, how the metrics were defined, and all the different ways the data needed to be sliced, filtered, and compared. My job was to get inside their heads and translate that knowledge into a design.

Designing for self-serve exploration

To eliminate repetitive manual reporting, the system needed to support both high-level executive overviews and deep-dive filtering without requiring one-off queries for every team.

Standardizing metrics and patterns

Four separate tools meant four different ways of measuring. Collaborating with business leads to agree on unified patterns  ensured I designed on a solid, agreed-upon baseline.

Delivered interfaces

Global department summary

This is the dashboard a Global Director of Research opens when they want to understand how the whole operation is performing; every team, every region, every sector, in a single view.

Interactions summary

Provides detailed insights and metrics for every interaction between analysts and clients, offering a comprehensive view of analyst performance and time spent with clients. Managers can identify which clients receive the most attention and which may be underserved, allowing for more strategic allocation of analyst time.

Reflections

Working on this project gave me another window into the scale and complexity of Morgan Stanley Researc. Knowing the number of decisions being made daily, at every level of the organisation, based on the metrics these dashboards surface, made the design work feel that much more consequential.

My contribution here was focused. I wasn't driving the strategy - the stakeholder leads knew exactly what they needed. What I brought was design expertise in the areas that are genuinely hard to get right: how tabular data should behave at scale, how filters should interact across complex datasets, how to present dense information without losing the signal. Sometimes the most valuable thing a designer can do is walk in, solve the specific problems that need solving, and get out of the way.