Neil Wehrle

Morningstar Portfolio Builder

Problem
Morningstar is a Chicago-based publisher of financial information targeted towards individual investors and independant analysts. I led a team of designers and programmers in developing the Portfolio Developer module, which unified three databases and allowed users to develop sophisticated models of their investment portfolios.

A major challenge was to create a software program with the functionality of a legacy DOS product, and the familiarity of the Windows products it was joining. We collaborated with our Editorial, Marketing, Technical and Product Support areas to help determine what our customers wanted. I also attended conferences and talked to customers to understand their needs. We gathered a large collection of the reports financial planners were giving to their clients.

Portfolio Developer starting screen.

Explorations
We ended up developing a solid model of how our customers worked by creating a profile of an archetypal investment planner, and used this to test our development efforts as we proceeded.
We hypothesized that they needed two tools – one that would allow quick estimations that could look forward (as much as anyone can in the financial world), and one that could construct detailed analyses of investments, so they could back-test ideas.

Porfolio Developer main screen.

Solution
We developed a dual-mode system, where a planner could start working in a mode that allowed for greater accuracy and complexity (Historical mode), and then switch over to a simpler, faster mode (Snapshot mode) to hash out more hypothetical scenarios. In keeping with Morningstar’s mantra of “democratization of information”, and the clarity espoused in Edward Tufte’s information design books, we developed a few graphs that were simple to generate and easy to interpret. This was in significant contrast to other software packages from competitors that used off-the-shelf graph generation modules to produce garish and unreadable charts.

Portfolio Developer risk/reward scatterplot graph.