Luma Creation Hub
Role: UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Technology: React Native
Duration: 9 Months
Team: EMEA Product Manager, EMEA Sales Manager & Team, Front & Backend Developers
Luma Financial Technologies provides the leading, independent, multi-issuer platform for structured products and annuities. For nearly a decade, broker-dealers and their advisors nationwide have used Luma, an award-winning platform, to more efficiently source, configure, compare, and price structured products and annuities that meet their customers' specific investment needs.
The Challenge
With Luma and other similar platforms (Leonteq, Deritrade, etc.), advisors can transact pre-build structured products or create custom products using a product builder. What is unique to Luma is the extent of issuers available for pricing in the US and EMEA regions. The product, design, and sales teams within Luma were looking to rebrand the entire platform. With this effort, we were not only improving the efficiency of the UX of the Creation Hub but also rolling out our new platform-wide UI styling, which would bring a host of exciting benefits to our users.
Our Initial Requirements:
Create a mobile responsive layout conducive to replication across the broader Luma platform.
We wanted to reassure the team that we are committed to maintaining the Creation Hub's existing functionality, ensuring a smooth transition and a sense of security for our users.
Add the ability for advisors to quickly (at a glance) compare the pricing of their custom product across as many issuers as possible.
Display attributes unique to this custom product throughout the advisor’s transaction journey.
Streamline bulk pricing requests.
Effectively show pending (user follow-up required) & live pricing concurrently.
Research & Analysis
When I undertook this project at Luma, I already had a relatively solid understanding of structured products and the extent of their attributes. However, I consulted with a few internal US and EMEA-based sales team members to better understand the advantage of a custom vs. off-the-shelf product for their clients.
Structured products are much more common and complex in EMEA than in the US. Most of my research was focused on learning more about our EMEA-based competitor platforms and their advantages.
With this research, our product team identified that a mobile-responsive layout of our Creation Hub could be a solid competitive advantage in the marketplace. We then met with advisors from several firms to gauge their excitement about a mobile-responsive option for the platform and how this could improve their in-person client meetings. We also gathered constructive feedback on our existing Creation Hub, what our competitors do, and how we could do better within a transaction.
Since structured products are highly regulated, there is a limit to what we can change in the construction of a custom product and what we can display where and when.
Exploration
Upon completing my comprehensive internal and external research, I delved into various strategies for developing a mobile-responsive layout for the Creation Hub. The approach we adopt for this mobile-capable experience will significantly influence how we structure our entry fields, the level of interactivity they offer, and the manner in which we gamify the visual feedback for users as they actively construct and ultimately price their client's product.
I also wanted to explore how much we wanted to involve the advisor in understanding how the core product parameters would affect the custom product they were building. Luma prides itself on being not only a transaction platform but also an education platform. Given that these products are newer to the US market, there is an opportunity to educate as much as possible about these products to build confidence for the advisors and, ultimately, their clients.
Lastly, I wanted to underscore the crucial role of advisors' active involvement in the build-price-edit workflow. What visual cues or novel insights can be offered during these individual steps to motivate advisors to continue learning and refining their ideas?
Outcomes
I created interactive click-through prototypes of the envisioned completed experience and shared them with our issuer partners in the US and EMEA regions. They gave us great feedback and eagerly awaited its launch.
Unfortunately, the new end-to-end Creation Hub was not completed before I left Luma. However, we had made significant progress in implementing the experience before my departure.
Key Learnings
Our team's expertise was evident in this project as we effectively distilled product-level knowledge into a user-friendly and straightforward custom product builder. This demonstrated our understanding of the structured products marketplace and our commitment to ensuring that any advisor, regardless of their experience level, could easily explore and transact for their clients.
Ultimatley, during the Luma Creation hub buildout phase, we encountered a few hurdles. Luma was in the process of shifting software management and offshoring several development teams. However, our team's adaptability was evident as we successfully navigated these changes. The decision was also made to halt the development of a responsive layout beyond the iPad dimensions; we remained focused on launching a thoughtful MVP of the Creation Hub.
