Crafting PIMCO’s Renaissance

Overview

With the sunset of the legacy DOTCOM experience, the challenge was to create an new innovative and creative solution for investment management that meet the evolving needs of the global market.

This modern presence would improve user experience, enhance brand perception, and simplify navigation for advisors, institutional investors, and retail investors.

Role

As the lead designer for this project, I oversaw the entire design process, which included research, facilitating discovery workshops with leadership, validating designs, and testing prototypes. I collaborated closely with the engineering team to ensure that the interaction and system scalability aligned with the guidelines I had established.

Impact

A clean, variable design system that is user-focused and has a clean structure to navigate. More access to features like product performance and investment strategies. With integrated high-impact visuals that support PIMCO’s chevron brand identity but also address modern sensibilities.

Research

We worked with McKinsey consultants and cross-functional teams to identify inconsistencies in our brand, map areas of pain, prioritize focus for an efficient design system, and develop a shared vision around elements in products by type of user.

• Keep in mind who the user is and where they are within the flow.
• Institutional investors and financial advisors needed instant access to portfolio management capabilities, market insights, and performance data.
• The brand needed to be perceived as new, but not at the expense of trust and credibility in the investment community.

Insights

Early user testing revealed that users intuited the new navigation but requested more pronounced visual cues for key data points.

With stakeholders wanting the combined experience of web and pro integrated to include Highcharts data visualizations and interactive tools for real-time monitoring of performance and analysis. This would also improve registration numbers and logins.

Architecture

It was challenging to design a scalable system for efficient financial operations and decision-making for a list of regions across the globe. At the time when the main focus was on strategies and products. We crafted solutions that enriched data, simplified journey flow, and ensured compliance while assisting the strategic objectives of the firm.

Refinement

We refined components with modular layouts and optimized content hierarchy based on stakeholder feedback and usability testing. Working with Engineering, we set up Figma variables and Storybook tokens to improve timing on feature rollouts on the roadmap.