DASHBOARDS / FINRA Fin-Crimes Investigation Dashboard
FINRA — Six Tools Replaced, Twelve Teams Aligned
SILOED TOOLS
REPLACED
INVESTIGATION TEAMS
ALIGNED
THE PROBLEM
FINRA's DXT initiative was stalling — not because investigators lacked tools, but because every team was using different ones, with no shared view of what was happening.
Six tools. Twelve teams. No shared view of active cases. Investigations were stalling not because investigators lacked capability — but because no single source of truth existed.
MATTER SEQUENCE — 7 INCIDENT TYPES ACROSS 6 NATIONAL CAUSE TEAMS, NO SHARED SOURCE OF TRUTH
THE CORE TENSION
The investigators didn't need faster tools. They needed one place where every team could see the same thing at the same time.
The DXT initiative was focused on speed — but the real blocker was visibility. Status lived in different systems depending on which team you asked. Once that root cause was clear, the design direction followed directly.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
What investigators actually told us.
Contextual inquiry across twelve investigation teams made the problem clear. Six siloed platforms, no shared case visibility, investigators manually copying case IDs between systems just to do their job. The DXT initiative was focused on speed. Research revealed the real blocker was structure.
REQUESTED FEATURES — CROSS-TEAM STAKEHOLDER INQUIRY ACROSS 12 INVESTIGATION TEAMS
Stakeholder Inquiry
❝
"I'm copying data between six different systems just to build one case."
Investigators were manually transferring information across disconnected platforms to assemble a single investigation record. Every transfer was a point of failure — and a delay in time-sensitive financial crimes work.
Stakeholder Inquiry
❝
"We can't see what the other team is doing on the same case."
Twelve investigation teams were operating in isolation. No shared visibility meant duplicated effort, missed connections between related cases, and no way to coordinate across the organization on complex investigations.
Stakeholder Inquiry
❝
"The tools aren't the problem. Nobody talks to each other."
Investigators had learned to work around their tools. The friction wasn't technical — it was structural. Each team had built its own workflow inside its own system, and none of them connected.
Stakeholder Inquiry
❝
"We find out a case is connected to another investigation weeks later."
Without a shared platform, case connections surfaced too late — or not at all. Financial crimes investigations depend on pattern recognition across cases. Siloed systems made that structurally impossible.
KEY FINDING
The problem wasn't the tools. It was the silos.
The most important finding wasn't about features. It was about the organizational structure that technology had been built around — and reinforced.
Every team was using different tools — not because investigators didn't need to collaborate, but because the organization had never given them a shared place to do it.
Six siloed tools. Twelve teams. Zero shared visibility. The technology wasn't causing the silos — it was encoding them. This finding reframed the entire design brief. The solution wasn't better tools — it was one platform where every team could see the same investigation at the same time.
"The most important design decision wasn't what investigators needed. It was figuring out what was missing when they all looked at the same thing together."
SERVICE BLUEPRINT — CROSS-TEAM INVESTIGATION FLOW ACROSS ACTORS, SYSTEMS, AND TOUCHPOINTS
CORE TENSION
Organizational control vs investigator autonomy — two needs the design couldn't sacrifice.
Leadership needed oversight across twelve teams. Investigators needed autonomy to work their cases without management overhead slowing them down. The design had to hold both simultaneously.
STAKEHOLDERS WANTED
Shared visibility across all teams
Audit trail on every action
Cross-team case connections
Consistent process governance
No bureaucratic overhead
Customizable workspace per role
Batch actions at scale
Priority flagging they control
DESIGN RESOLVED
Manager view active case dashboard
Every priority linked to investigator
Angular/.NET widget governance
Batch selection at investigation scale
The Resolution
Managers see the full picture across all teams. Investigators own their workspace and their cases. The platform surfaces shared context without removing individual control.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Every decision traced back to a finding.
Unified investigation workspace — replacing six siloed tools with one shared platform.
MY WORKSPACE DASHBOARD — ALL MATTER TYPES, TEAMS, AND CASE STATUS IN A SINGLE VIEW
The silos weren't accidental — they were encoded in the technology. Every tool had been chosen by a team for a team. The fix had to be organizational, not just technical.
Modular by design — customizable to the investigator, governed by the organization.
MODULAR WORKSPACE VIEW — INVESTIGATOR AND MANAGER ROLES SURFACED THROUGH CONFIGURABLE DASHBOARD CONTROLS
The platform needed to be flexible at the investigator level and governed at the organization level. Role-based modularity was the only architecture that could serve both simultaneously.
Lo-fi prototype shared directly with investigators the first time this feedback process had ever been run at FINRA.
EARLY NAVIGATION WIREFRAME — SELF-GUIDED PROTOTYPE WITH FILTER PANEL AND ASSIGNMENT FLOW
If investigators had to be guided through the prototype, the feedback would be about the guidance not the design. The prototype had to work without a facilitator in the room.
Every priority linked to an investigator — accountability built into the data model.
DESIGNED MATTER CARDS — PRIORITY, INVESTIGATOR, AND CASE STATUS SURFACED AT A GLANCE
Priority is only meaningful if it's visible to the right people at the right level. Linking every priority to a named investigator made accountability explicit without requiring manual reporting.
Matter sequence and service blueprint — mapping the full investigation flow before designing any screen.
END-TO-END INVESTIGATION FLOW — FULL SERVICE BLUEPRINT MAPPED ACROSS ALL TWELVE TEAMS BEFORE UI WORK BEGAN
A service blueprint wasn't just a research artifact — it was the foundation the entire design had to be built on. Without it, any screen designed would be optimizing one team's workflow at the expense of another's.
WHAT USER SAID
Slowness — investigations taking too long to resolve
Every team pointed to the same symptom: things moved too slowly. Escalations were delayed, status was unclear, and critical signals weren't reaching the right people. The instinct was to optimize each team's individual workflow.
WHAT RESEARCH REVEALED
Silos — each team operating in its own disconnected system
The actual cause was structural: different teams used different tools, spoke different status languages, and had no shared view of case state. Optimizing individual workflows would have left the coordination problem completely unsolved.
MY ROLE
Led UX design for the Financial Crimes Investigation Dashboard — contextual research through widget architecture and final prototype validation.
WHAT I OWNED
Full UX scope — contextual inquiry, workflow mapping, investigative flow architecture, widget component design, interaction fidelity prototyping, fast validation testing, and visual clarity refinement.
HOW I WORKED
Designed for FINRA's Gateway platform on AWS — a widget-centric dashboard with an Angular frontend and .NET microservices backend. Components were built as modular, interchangeable widgets consumable across the full platform.
THE CONSTRAINT
Contextual inquiry revealed what the DXT initiative hadn't named: teams were working in siloed tools with no shared source of truth for case status. The unified dashboard wasn't the starting assumption — it was where the evidence pointed.
PROCESS
Five phases — from contextual inquiry and workflow mapping to interaction fidelity and fast validation.
Contextual inquiry revealed the real problem: every team was tracking the same cases in different systems with no shared truth. That single finding reframed the entire design direction.
Discovery & Research Delivery
Contextual inquiry across investigative teams revealed the real blocker: no shared source of truth, not slow workflows.
Building the Unified Mental Model
Mapped the full investigative lifecycle — tracing case intake to resolution and surfacing where investigators needed consolidated context most urgently.
Platform Architecture & Solutions
Architected a modular widget system in Angular/.NET — purpose-built so investigative data from every team could surface into a single governed workspace.
4
Modular Mind Mechanics
Built widget patterns flexible enough for every team's data model — without requiring a custom solution for each one.
5
Implementation & Governance
Shipped AWS-ready specs and Angular/.NET component governance — adopted by FINRA's Gateway platform and handed off with zero ambiguity.
WIDGET - BASED ARCHITECTURE
Modular by design customizable by investigator
Built on FINRA Gateway's widget framework — each investigative function (case summary, alert feed, data cross-reference, timeline) existed as an independent, interchangeable component. Investigators could configure their workspace without losing system coherence.
CROSS-TEAM ALIGNMENT
Every priority traceable to investigator evidence
The contextual inquiry data directly drove feature prioritization, widget hierarchy, and information density decisions. Nothing in the final design was arbitrary — every choice mapped back to a documented investigator need or workflow constraint.
"The most important design decision wasn't visual — it was defining which investigative functions needed to live together in the same view, and which ones could stay a click away."
OUTCOMES
A unified investigative workspace — six tools replaced, twelve teams aligned, one shared source of truth.
Consolidated 6+ investigative tools into a single, configurable workspace — eliminating the context switching that slowed investigator decision-making.
Widget-based architecture adopted across FINRA Gateway — modular components that investigators could configure around their specific workflow needs.
Faster alert triage and case review — structured risk indicators and progressive disclosure replaced manual cross-refere
Single shared source of truth — for the first time Every investigative team seeing the same case status in the same place, ending the coordination failures that slowed resolution.
PROJECT GALLERY
From investigation flow mapping to unified case workspace
Impact/Effort Matrix — Feature Prioritization
Complaint Investigation Process Flow
Disposition — U5 Investigation Process Flow
Card Hierarchy 01
Card Hierarchy 02
Card Hierarchy 03
Complaint
Admin View
U5 Disposition
Batch Selection — Multi-Case Assignment Workflow
Final Dashboard — Investigator
Manager View — Active Cases & Team Assignment
What I'd do differently
Start widget governance conversations with engineering earlier. The modular architecture worked well, but some widget interaction patterns particularly cross-widget data sharing and state persistence weren't fully defined until mid-build. A joint design-engineering session on widget communication contracts at the start of the project would have prevented the rework that came later. When the component architecture is this central to the product, the technical model and the design model need to be designed together from day one.