FactSet Shareholder Meeting Report
the problem
FactSet has a wide variety of shareholder meetings, board details, and voting data. That data is spread across multiple reports and applications. The user needs a singular access point understand the narrative and details of a company’s shareholder meeting. Additionally, some of the data non-standard with FactSet’s UX standards so this needed to be updated.
The original report used an old acquired UI and the user had to touch multiple elements to pull meeting data together.
Users had to wade through a company profile and historical data to drill into their desired meeting’s details.
Meeting details had no context or historical reference, only a simple table of proposal vote counts.
The breakdown
The product manager had evaluated several competitor products and reached out to users using our UX research team. Several key points were provided from the discovery research and usability around current offerings.
Users need a visible hierarchy of the data. The different part of a meeting needed to be organized and simplified.
Users didn’t need to see excerpts of the transcripts, but would like access to them for deeper research.
Users wanted to see levels of data and trends, but not all at once.
Board cross-relationships were brought up several times.
The main objectives of the users were spread out across multiple applications and workflows.
We worked together to define a workflow starting with looking up a company. The users were predominately asset manager and hedge funds tracking a particular company.
The solution
I made several versions in Axure to test with users and evaluate the information architecture. We eventually settled on four tiles that break down the report while allowing users to drill down or traverse relationships.
I also visualized as many data points as I could without creating a carnival effect. This was to allow scan-ability while drawing users into deeper data.
Initial wires in Axure take form around tiles separating the different aspects of a shareholder meeting
Data hierarchy is refined with some additions to the individual sections.
results
Testing of the MVP showed users liked the layout and were particularly fond of the visual data points. The ability to drill down into data or jump to related data was also mentioned as a high point. The best KPI was usage of the old reports dropped significantly when this was rolled out. FactSet was able to sunset old reports, support, and resources since our user workflows were supported in one new application.
Unfortunately, technical limitations did not allow for developers to create the network map of board relationship, but that is planned for a future sprint.
The first version was released with high-value, low-effort features as we gain more user feedback on the future direction.
High level trends with simple visualizations take up the first tile. The user has access to more details via the info boxes within each tile.
Proposals and source details are available for the user to drill down into. Exact proposal and meeting text was available for further analysis and context.
Vote breakdowns were available for any proposal in a contextual box on click.
Board sentiment, bios, and relationships are available in the directors section. The user can also see voting activity by ownership blocks with activism ratings.