InvestCloud Product Design: Lessons from the Land of Lego Jonathan Bentley Out of the box, one size fits all software is now a thing of the past. InvestCloud is pioneering an approach to application design using “structured” customization that is radically overturning the notion of what is possible with financial software. A touchstone concept from InvestCloud’s 2015 User Conference was how InvestCloud’s platform can best be understood through the filters of Fulfillment, Function, and Form. In the opening session, InvestCloud’s CEO, John Wise focused on fulfillment: the importance of getting the data right. Following that, Head of Sales, Michael Smith, talked about the 10 functional stages of adoption that can move a firm beyond market requirements into leadership at the digital “edge”. This week, we will pick up with a session from the User Conference on design. With this, we are referring to both “functional” design as well as “form” design. Through the “functional” and “form” aspect of design, we will be emphasizing how the architecture of the InvestCloud platform lends itself to an amazing degree of design flexibility. Beauty More than Skin Deep Taking a look at the bigger picture, we will first focus on form design. These are the traditional design elements—the visualization of the portal. We take website aesthetics very seriously. We do not simply drop a firm’s logo onto a white-label screen. When we design client portals, we consider all of the firms’ branding elements; this includes logos, color palette, font and image use, menu structure and orientation, and others. We believe strongly that colors should be used carefully and sparingly to highlight the site, fonts need to be legible with a consistent size and format. It is important to use negative space to keep things from feeling cluttered. Quick tip: when in doubt, keep things simple and avoid noisy, cluttered elements and ornaments. InvestCloud’s platform is built to provide complete creative flexibility in designing the screen “forms” with which you interact. That said, as an integrated platform, the important point is how these screens are tied to underlying applet combinations that can be designed as well. Building Blocks that Rock Moving on to "functional" design, we used the compares of LEGO® blocks as a helpful way to understand the nature of InvestCloud's platform architecture during our conference. LEGO® is one of the most successful toy platforms in history, laid end to end, the number of LEGO® bricks sold that year would stretch round the world more than 18 times. Using just two eight-stud LEGO® bricks, it can be combined in 24 different ways and three eight-stud LEGO® bricks in 1,060 ways. This explains why one of the LEGO®'s more successful branding phrases over
the years was, "LEGO® - its what you make of it." Thousands of Data Views and Counting The LEGO® idea applies to InvestCloud in a very similar fashion. LEGO®’s bricks represents our applets on our platform. We have now built over 151 financial applets all of which can be variously combined in an integrated fashion to produce a potentially unlimited number of data-views. Our clients have created over 3000 thousand views and applet configurations and the number continues to grow. This is only possible because of our Programs Writing Programs (PWP) approach as well as our modular architecture that allows the design process to be flexibly managed by a business analysts working closely with the end client. Our ability to do rapid iterations enables our clients to take apart the “blocks” that they do not like and assemble them differently. This is something that the old enterprise programming approach cannot do, irrespective of where the functionality is delivered through the cloud or not. To find out more about InvestCloud’s amazingly flexible platform and how its applets could be used to assemble your own custom configuration, contact us at 888-800-0188 or visit us at www.investcloud.com. Jonathan Bentley leads InvestCloud’s content development and management division. From helping advisors better craft and deliver their stories to curating customized advisor RSS site feeds, Jonathan's team is critical to InvestCloud’s bespoke design and site management services. Jonathan was previously founder and CEO of LightPort Inc. which merged with InvestCloud in 2013. Previously a practicing RIA, while at LightPort Jonathan was involved in developing web portals for more than 500 advisors and money managers.