Design Strategy · Product Evolution · 2022–2025
Introducing design leadership to an enterprise platform managing thousands of financial indexes
Nasdaq's Index Management System had evolved for years without a design practice — no research, no shared visual language, no feedback loops. A formal design strategy was developed, presented to Nasdaq leadership, and accepted. What followed was a two-year overhaul that reshaped every surface of a system used daily by 30–40 index analysts.
30–40
Index analysts daily
783+
Active indexes managed
2 yr
End-to-end engagement
What is the Index Management System?
IMS is the internal platform Nasdaq uses to manage the lifecycle of every financial index in its portfolio — from initial research and approval through ongoing rebalances, reconstitutions, and compliance attestations. It serves index portfolio managers, operations analysts, launch coordinators, and compliance teams. Every index Nasdaq publishes — hundreds of them, tracking trillions in assets — flows through this system.
A system that worked, but nobody loved
IMS had been built sprint by sprint for years — every screen a direct response to a feature request, never to a user need. There was no research practice, no design system, no shared visual language, and no structured feedback loop. The result: dense forms with no hierarchy, a navigation structure that reflected internal team vocabulary rather than user tasks, and an application that Nasdaq — a company that takes its brand seriously — would never have shipped externally.
Original IMS — Add New Index form
Before
The most-used workflow in the system. 5-column field grid, 9-step stepper bar, no visual hierarchy, labels indistinguishable from values. This is what analysts saw every day.
A formal strategy — not a redesign request
The response wasn't to start making screens prettier. A formal design strategy was developed and presented to Nasdaq stakeholders — a structured proposal for how to introduce design maturity into a project that had never had it. The strategy was accepted and became the operating framework for the next two years of product evolution.
01
User Research Plan
Structured interviews, card sorting exercises, user shadowing, surveys, and A/B testing protocols — establishing a proactive research practice where none existed. Every design decision would trace to documented user evidence.
02
North Star Metrics
Seven quantitative and qualitative metrics defined — overall user satisfaction, feature adoption rate, workflow completion time, error rate, monthly active users, support ticket volume, and NPS. Measured quarterly to track the impact of design changes over time.
03
Prototype-First Development
A new development protocol: every high-impact feature prototyped one sprint before engineering begins. Prototypes built directly in Appian — interactive, testable with real users, and reusable as production code. No throwaway mockups.
Understanding who we were building for
Structured discovery sessions, workflow shadowing, and stakeholder interviews produced a set of user personas that became the foundation for every design decision — documenting who the analysts were, how they spent their time, what frustrated them, and what they actually needed the system to do.
User Persona — Index Portfolio Analyst
Research
User Persona — Index Operations
Research
📋
Task clarity above everything
R&R evaluation tasks had due dates buried across multiple views. Analysts had no single surface showing what needed their attention and when.
📜
Record-keeping was table stakes
"I want to make sure there's a record tracked for Index changes." Audit trail and historical visibility weren't nice-to-haves — they were regulatory requirements.
⚡
Approval workflows created anxiety
Analysts needed confidence their R&Rs were correct before escalating to their lead. The system gave them no validation signals to calibrate against.
Restructuring before redesigning
The first design deliverable wasn't a screen — it was a sitemap. IMS had grown organically for years, with navigation reflecting internal team vocabulary rather than user tasks. The IA overhaul renamed, consolidated, and restructured every section of the application into 8 clear primary areas before a single interface was redesigned.
IMS Sitemap — Q1 2024 · 8 primary sections
IA Deliverable
783 indexes, instantly navigable
The Index Inventory was the main entry point to IMS — and in the original system, it was a flat searchable table with no summary metrics and no way to understand the portfolio at a glance. The redesign added a contextual sidebar with quick actions, a KPI strip surfacing the most important numbers, and a table that could be filtered and customized without leaving the page.
Redesigned Index Inventory — sidebar, KPI strip, filterable table
Redesigned
614 active in-scope indexes, 4 launched, 6 terminated — all visible before a single filter is applied. The sidebar surfaces the most common actions (Manage Assignments, Bulk Reassignment, Add New Index) where users need them.
The screen analysts live in
The Index Record is where analysts spend most of their day — reviewing evaluation schedules, tracking rebalance and reconstitution details, managing team assignments, and monitoring outstanding tasks. The redesign replaced a flat form-heavy layout with a structured two-panel view: a persistent sidebar for contextual information and a tabbed main panel for deep content navigation.
Index Record — Index Evaluations tab
Redesigned
Sidebar: analyst assignments with role badges, compliance alerts, attached documents, outstanding tasks. Main panel: rebalance/reconstitution schedules, reference date configurations, upcoming and past evaluation tables. The pre-attestation compliance warning appears prominently rather than buried in a field row.
What changed
Four interconnected enterprise applications designed, prototyped, and shipped with a unified visual language applied for the first time.
A design strategy accepted by Nasdaq leadership that established a user research practice, a prototyping standard, and a north star metrics framework where none had existed — and sustained it across a two-year engagement.
Measurable adoption and satisfaction gains tracked through the metrics framework established in the design strategy. The system went from a tool analysts tolerated to one they could navigate, trust, and give feedback on.
The most meaningful outcome wasn't a screen or a metric. It was that a product that had never had a design culture now had one — and it showed in every interaction.