Hubble
Product Design, Mobile UX
A mobile-first lead management tool for investment bankers, redesigned after research revealed the original direction was solving the wrong problem.
The bankers didn't need a better tool. They needed one that didn't feel like a threat.
The Problem
Investment bankers at Credit Suisse were running on fragmented manual processes. Scanning newspapers for company news. Losing track of who across the bank had relationships with key clients. No centralised place for interactions, meetings, or correspondence. And almost never at a desk, which ruled out any desktop-first solution before we'd even started.
But the real problem only surfaced in research. When we got in front of the bankers we were designing for, we found something the original brief hadn't accounted for. They didn't just find the existing tools inconvenient. They saw a new internal tracking tool as a direct threat to their expertise, their relationships, their value to the bank. An investment banker's edge is knowing things other people don't. A system that made that knowledge visible and shared felt like it was working against them, not for them.
That reframing changed everything.
The Solution
We stopped and went back into qualitative research with a completely reframed set of questions, and rebuilt our understanding of what these people actually needed day to day and what would make them willing to use something at all.
The product we designed complemented their expertise rather than competing with it. News aggregation surfaced relevant company updates automatically, so bankers weren't manually scanning for signals. Connection insights made relationship knowledge visible across the organisation in a way that felt additive rather than exposing. Interaction tracking centralised meetings and correspondence so active leads didn't fall through the cracks. And the whole thing was built mobile-first, because that's where these people actually worked.
The shift in how users related to the product, from something imposed on them to something they could see themselves reaching for, was the outcome that mattered most. Not a metric. A change in posture.
Impact
Platform
Mobile First
Research Reset
Mid-Project
