Finding the Patterns Across Four Voices — and the Design Principles That Emerged
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 📅 Project | OmniRisk · Financial Workflow Dashboard |
| 🔖 Phase | Discover → Define |
| 🧩 Inputs | 4 themes from the Affinity Map |
| 🗂️ Output | 4 design principles · 2 persona archetypes |
The Affinity Map clustered 72 observations into 16 sub-themes under 4 top-level themes. The synthesis pass took those four themes and surfaced two things: the design principles that should guide every downstream decision, and the behavioral clusters that became the two personas.
This is the bridge between research evidence and design direction. The findings here are what every design decision in the case study traces back to.
🖼️ Visual: See the Affinity Synthesis visual embedded below — four theme blocks with full findings under each, followed by the four design principles and the path from synthesis to personas.
Across all four participants, manual execution is the default. The hedge-fund and fintech analysts manage reconciliation through spreadsheets. The trader pulls data from fragmented systems. The head of IT's team debugs broken integrations by hand. At every level, human effort substitutes for system capability.
"The lack of integration between tools is a big issue. I often have to pull data from multiple sources, which increases the chances of errors and slows me down." — Middle Office Analyst, Hedge Fund
Bloomberg doesn't integrate with internal systems. Proprietary tools don't connect to external platforms. Custodian records arrive separately from broker confirmations. Every participant described the same problem: the data exists, but it lives in the wrong place.
Neither the hedge-fund analyst nor the trader has access to real-time integrated data. Decisions are made against rate infrastructure that runs on a delay — FCM rates arrive on weekly schedules, cross-referenced against Bloomberg in Excel, reconciled T+1. The gap between insight and action, across separate tools on different clocks, is the structural limitation on every trade timing decision.