J.P. Morgan & Chase
A tool for financial analysts to simulate the impact of essential service outages.
The J.P. Morgan & Chase Asset Outage Modeling Tool, or AOMT, assists analysts with emergency and disaster preparation planning and compliance. It is used by disaster management teams to model outage scenarios and identify potential cascading failure modes for critical financial infrastructure.
AOMT automates common risk analysis workflows and calculations, freeing up valuable mindshare for analysts to focus on creating precise and thorough strategic plans.
I worked end-to-end, from strategy, to scoping and design, to final delivery, guiding the reporting & analytics work stream and communicating with the client.
Research
The early stages of this project focused on extensive domain and user research to understand the disaster management landscape, including the specific challenges and requirements of J.P. Morgan's own disaster management team.
This involved user interviews, workflow observation sessions, and studying government regulations for disaster readiness. Below, you can see some my research untangling the complexity of how dependencies work.
Scoping the work
Understanding existing workflows, regulatory requirements, and individual users was crucial for scoping the design work. Through my research, I was able to infer additional feature requirements and optimize the layout and interactions based on the needs of real analysts.
I worked closely with the product owner to gather and understand business requirements and with a disaster management specialist to prioritize features.
Navigation
To navigate easily between criteria selection, applying filters, and viewing dependencies, the panel layout needed to be flexible.
Custom Inputs
To account for all the different asset types, as well as the specific assets themselves, the criteria panel needed a custom input for asset selection.
Bi-directional Linkages
To check and analyze dependencies, the dependency viewer needed a visualization of bi-directional linkages that could be understood at a glance.
Drill-ins & Downloads
To continue analysis in Excel, the dependency viewer needed to allow for drill-ins and data table downloads at any point while using the tool.
Workflow
This workflow centers on two tasks:
Performing a search for various assets or compliance criteria, to view an overview of the model.
Mapping the interdependencies of the resulting data, to understand potential cascading failures.
Example: Modeling disaster plans for a hurricane
To remain focused on a real use case while designing the interface, I focused on a hypothetical scenario:
Working against this scenario made it easier to generate accurate notional data to present to the client, and helped me understand outage modeling enough to create the scope for design and implementation.
Analysts need to modify their models without starting from scratch, viewing in real-time the impact their criteria modification would cause. To enable this workflow, I pushed for a two-pane layout allowing analysts to reactively refine search queries and filters by interacting with the dependency pane.
Core workflows
1
Performing searches with the criteria panel
Outcomes
I was able to unite stakeholders around a common understanding of user needs and UX best practices. Insights provided by my early research led to an accurately prioritized, cost-effective feature set that clearly addressed users' pain points.
The client's project manager left glowing feedback to that effect:
My work on this project made the client confident in the consultancy's abilities, leading to a 6-month contract extension and budget to add three members to the project team. With a strong foundation for the future, the client has also been able to add new features and grow usage of the tool.