Reimagining the Insight Direct Portal
- Product Design
- Stakeholder Management
- Design-Led
A design solution for better engagement and efficiency. This is the story of a project I worked on at DBS — not just from a design or research perspective, but how design helped move the product, the team, and the organisation forward. It was messy, constrained, and initially framed as a reskin. What made the difference wasn’t a specific UX method, but how we led decisions, reduced risk, and built trust over time.
Context
Insight Direct is an investment research platform used by both retail investors and institutional clients. Content is created by DBS analysts and economists and is publicly accessible.
- What is this product? An investment research platform for retail and institutional clients.
- What does it serve? Market insights for investment, authored by DBS analysts and economists.
- What’s the long-term goal? Drive investments, build credibility, and enable future monetisation.
This context mattered because we were designing not just for end users, but also for internal analysts and long-term business goals.
Some real challenges
- Business thought it was a simple fix. Stakeholders initially expected a simple reskin and to build what was already in BAU.
- Team & product were new. The team had low UX and product maturity.
- High dependency on design. There was no clear direction on what to build — a lot depended on design to lead the product.
There was limited user data to rely on. So the real challenge was: how do we introduce better decision-making and effective design without overwhelming or alienating the team?
Goal: MVP 1
Increase engagement and repeat visits by making investment insights easier to discover, understand, and act on.
This wasn’t just about visual polish — it was about helping users get value faster, stay longer, and feel confident using the platform as part of their investment journey.
Key insights
Early drop-off and weak content discovery. 50% of users dropped off after the first scroll, and 80% dropped off before reaching the lower three-quarters of the page. Navigation wasn’t intuitive and key content was hard to find.
Hidden functions & limited data visibility. Filters, price charts, and reports were buried inside tables with no clear visual indicators, and only a limited number of columns were shown at a time.
How we approached it
- Improve information architecture to increase discovery, viewership, and engagement.
- Reduce hidden interactions so key functionality is obvious and easy to use.
- Adopt the updated DBS design system to improve clarity and consistency.
- Support learning through financial terms and glossaries to keep users in the journey.
- Use graphs and interactive elements to make insights more engaging, scannable, and easier to interpret.
What really moved the needle
The biggest impact wasn’t just the screens or features — it was how we worked and led decisions.
- Introduced UX without jargon → reduced resistance and helped the product team learn the process through practice.
- Ran live PRD sessions with product owners using real examples → PRDs became a shared thinking and decision-making tool, not just documentation.
- Framed research as reducing risk, not proving certainty → allowed progress despite limited data by focusing on what we could validate quickly and deliver as quick wins.
- Aligned leadership early through a rolling product deck → built trust, created clarity on goals and gaps, and sped up decisions.
- Delivered an MVP alongside an ideal-state vision → showed immediate value while exciting leadership about what was possible next, unlocking further investment.
Impact
29% increase in visits versus the same period the previous year (comparing the first 6 months) — higher engagement driven by improved discovery, clarity, and visual interest.
37% increase in user engagement within 6 months of launch, after improving information architecture and content discoverability.
80% overall feedback satisfaction, gathered from focus-group discussions conducted prior to the official launch.
More importantly, leadership confidence increased. The clearer structure, improved discovery, and visual clarity made the product feel more intentional and valuable — which shifted how stakeholders talked about the platform.
After launching MVP 1
- Finding new opportunities. Interviewed three analysts to understand their daily workflows, with a focus on reducing toil and improving CMS maintainability.
- Explored MVP 2. A strong MVP 1 foundation enabled MVP 2 initiatives — including a portfolio builder — and helped secure budget for an additional designer.
This showed how design impact extended from product to organisational change.
Key takeaways
- Impact comes from reducing risk and moving forward, not perfect research.
- UX methods don’t need jargon to be effective.
- Strong foundations enable future investment and initiatives.
- Designers influence beyond screens: lead clarity, make trade-offs, and guide the team.
The redesign adopts DBS’s latest Design System (DLS 3.1), a web studio that is code-ready, and is fully responsive across breakpoints.