Helping investment professionals explore and visualize market data to uncover meaningful investment insights.
MSCI has one of the world's most comprehensive index libraries, a vast and trusted universe spanning markets, strategies and investment themes.
Access is costly and fragmented. Users pay per index, download the data and analyze it in their own tools, so it's hard to see the full breadth of what's available.
Bring the index universe into one place, connecting discovery, exploration and analysis in a single experience.
Index researchers and my PM wrote the brief. They asked me to explore a view that starts broad and drills down by region, country, then sector.
A single hierarchy over a library of data this broad forces everyone down the same path.
The goal was to show the whole library in one place. A drill-down is one way to do that, but I was not convinced that we were making the correct assumption about how users want to explore the data.
The project was still ambiguous, so I ran five exploratory interviews on the initial drill-down version to validate the concept before building further. Participants were asset owners, asset managers and Client Coverage.
“This is the information I want to see, but not how I want to see it.”
The data was right and the path to it was wrong.
The interviews showed two distinct groups who want similar data but reach it in different ways.
Organizations investing their own institutional money. They use MSCI indexes to understand markets, evaluate investments and decide where to invest. What they need most is guidance and context.
Investment firms managing money for clients. They use MSCI indexes to make investment decisions, measure performance and build investment products. What they need most is speed and control.
We were unsure which direction to take, so my PM and I co-facilitated a workshop including Design, PM, Engineering, Client services, and Index Solutions Researchers. The goals were to conduct a review of the research first, then move on to ideation
We agreed on one insight: the data users want is the same, but the way they want to reach it is different. The experience had to differ for each group even if the metrics and visualizations overlapped. They might look at different indexes and explore them in different ways.
The ideation covered two things. We explored different navigation patterns, and we worked out exactly which visualizations were needed and how to group them.
Power users needed more control over the indexes. Less advanced users needed room to explore. We did not want to design the same experience twice, so we asked of every concept:
“What value does this add that the other features didn't?”
Once a concept could answer that, we knew it was worth exploring.
I dropped drill-down to explore other ways of navigating. The data is broad, and I wanted users to have a clean way to access all of it.
Once we agreed on a direction, it was still abstract for the team. The new structure was a large overhaul of the earlier versions, and my PM and the researchers found it hard to picture.
I rapidly prototyped the new version so they could react to something real and tangible.
The next step was approval. I demoed the application to the Chief Research & Development Officer, Client Coverage, the Index researchers, and our PM and Engineering partners. Client Coverage had brought the need, the researchers had written the brief, and Engineering would have to build it, so every group in the room had a stake.
The team had previously not liked the drill-down structure, but they couldn't picture an alternative either. A visual representation of the new information architecture, with the research behind each decision, gave them what they needed. The decisions matched the requirements and filled the need, and their approval was the go-ahead to ship the product.
One system that supports both exploration and precision, without compromising either.
The Market view starts with MSCI selected indexes based on current trends. Filters for region, country, category, size and market mirror how investors already think, so a view like ESG trends across US indexes is a few clicks away.
The Indexes tab puts MSCI's library in one searchable table with over 2,100 indexes, filterable by code or name, with returns across time periods at a glance.
Index details open in place, with absolute and relative performance against a chosen benchmark plus top sector and country weights. One click adds the index to a comparison.
The Compare view allows users to select their own list of curated indexes, and a widget library lets teams add views like sector heatmaps or scatter plots building a dashboard around the question in front of them, or the client across the table.
“Very helpful for presenting to clients, especially when they come to you with open questions.”
A vast majority of our meetings with clients is covering market insights. This is going to be an incredible tool.