New ActiveDisclosure
SEC Filing Editor

New ActiveDisclosure is the main project I worked on during my time with Devbridge - before, during, and after the acquisition that turned our team into Cognizant. The product itself was the biggest project Devbridge had, worth 15 million dollars annually and 85 employees comprised of engineers, product managers, and product designers. I was one of the two product designers and I worked across all workstreams (and two non-Devbridge workstreams) to ensure consistency across the product, maintain the product vision, and upkeep the design library we built for this product. After about a year on the product, I took over as the lead designer on this product and pushed the product to launch.

Overview

PROJECT OVERVIEW: Document editor for filing financial information

Product: Online editor for users to be able to co-edit financial documents before filing them with the SEC.

We built a product, similar to a Microsoft Word or Google Docs, where you can upload all your documentation, review it, edit it, and file it all at once. This platform offers users the best experience possible to upload information, add comments, utilize iXBRL tagging, annotate information, tag individuals, and review all changes - all while still being able to change fonts, line weight, table sizes, headers, image DPIs, page colors, and more.

Each workstream has its own features that it focused on and I design across each one as we build this product.

Tools:

  • Figma - Building our design library, building wireframes and prototypes to share with PO’s and engineers, and leading discovery efforts as we explore new features

  • Miro - Brainstorming activities and defining the scope of each feature

  • Azure - Monitoring tickets and stories as they come in and out of sprints, updating design tags, and keeping the Product Managers informed on timelines

Responsibilities:

Product Ownership

  • Led discussions with our product officers on each feature to maintain our Agile methodology, update all timelines, create understanding of each feature, and ensure each part of the platform functions seamlessly with the others in terms of our user’s experience

Information Architecture

  • Established a design library, focusing on google font icons and existing design patterns from our competitors

  • Created site maps for all user types to ensure each user had the best experience for all

Visual Design

  • Crafted high-fi and lo-fi prototypes in Figma

  • Designed all interactions for our platform to ensure the best user experience

  • Updated all design schemas to have the best handoff with our engineers as possible

  • Designed microinteractions (hover states, modals, tooltips, and more)

  • Implemented user and client feedback in iterations to improve the design

ProcesS:

Utilizing design thinking, we conducted user interviews with potential customers, helped product owners establish a vision for our product, designed iterations of each feature, and delivered it all as one team.

A few parts of the project I am particularly proud that I helped deliver:

  • Creation of a paginated editor

  • Process of attaching supplemental documents to your project to support your claims and financial information (Tie-out binders)

  • Redesigning all annotations, like our new comment panel

Demos

The client put together some demos for their sales team to start showcasing some of their newest features - I do not own any of these videos, but they do a good job showcasing some of the projects I was working on.

Success?

We achieved many of our goals, led the way for discussions surrounding our timeline, and got our users very excited to use our new product. There is still some testing that needs to be done and some features that are currently being worked on that will make the UX even better, but I am very proud of this project and am very excited to see how it’s adopted by the users.

Conclusions and Future Recommendations

There is a lot more that can be done with this product and I am very excited for the next few releases of this - one of them includes one of my favorite parts of the whole thing and I can’t wait to see how users like it!

Personal Findings

I learned so much through my time on this product. I gained a lot of trust from the product owners through our time working together, which gave me a lot of freedom to try new ideas and experiment with existing solutions. From being overwhelmed by the sheer size of this product to leading the charge for design, I loved working on this so much. I am so proud of this product and I am very excited to see what’s next!