Two Platforms, One Advisor, Zero Patience
Role: Enterprise Product Designer | Employer: Altimetrik | Client: SS&C Technologies | Duration: 6 months
A six-month design-led engagement on how DST Vision and myPLANnetwork could feel like one connected advisor experience, without flattening the depth that made each worth using.
I DESIGNED
Persona models, end-to-end journeys, high-fidelity concepts for a unified advisor workspace, linear Figma prototype, and a reusable design-system blueprint
I PROPOSED
Responsibility-based dashboards, and the shared-core model for reporting and enrollment
TEAM OWNED
Engineering and deployment (out of scope for this engagement), and the Vision and myPLANnetwork platforms themselves
THE PROBLEM
SS&C Vision had evolved over decades into a broadly capable advisor platform. But its navigation reflected product evolution and business lines more than how advisors actually work. Advisors don't think in product boundaries. They think in clients, plans, accounts, and what needs attention next.
Scope: DST Vision (advisors managing wealth accounts and books of business) and myPLANnetwork (retirement-plan administration, participants, and TPAs). Many users cross both in a day. The goal wasn't a technical merger. It was experience cohesion.
Why now: advisor retirements and a younger generation raised on AI-assisted software made this modernization timely, not optional.
"The platform did not suffer from a lack of functionality. It suffered from a lack of continuity."
01 · RESPONSIBILITIES, NOT PERSONAS
Forget personas. What is this person on the hook for?
The most useful distinction wasn't demographic. It was the responsibility each person carried and the decision they needed to make after logging in.
Each dashboard became a workspace, not a collection of metrics: persistent context for role, client, plan, and filters; modular widgets with role-based defaults; quick actions next to the information that triggers them.
A unified platform didn't mean identical dashboards. It meant a common interaction foundation with different default priorities.
One core, four on-ramps
Advisors, branch managers, and operations teams needed different aggregation, history, filtering, and export. The challenge wasn't generating reports. It was helping users define scope, interpret results, identify exceptions, and return to action. Enrollment had legitimate pathway differences for representatives, branches, dealers, trusts, and tax identifiers, but uncontrolled variation would have meant duplicated effort.
Both workflows converged on one rule:
SHARED CORE
Branch path
Dealer path
TPA path
One shared core with role-specific paths layered on top, so the two felt like one system rather than two features bolted together.
THE TRADEOFF
Why modernization beat starting over
OPTIONS
A from-scratch rebuild of both platforms, or at least a wholly new design system.
CHOICE
Ruled out. Make targeted improvements that point toward a future direction while preserving existing capabilities, architecture, client variation, and the business model behind Vision's two decades.
COST
A less dramatic deliverable: a reusable blueprint and extended design language instead of a flashy new system. In return, stakeholders got a direction they could act on without destabilizing what already worked.
OUTCOME
A blueprint, not a shipped product
The engagement translated the experience challenge into a concrete future-state vision. Its value was the design strategy, the interaction model, and a demonstrable concept, rather than a production release or measured business result.
STRATEGY & JOURNEYS
Problem framing, research-informed persona models, and end-to-end journeys made the proposed experience direction explicit.
PROTOTYPE & DESIGN LANGUAGE
High-fidelity workspace concepts, a linear Figma prototype, and a reusable design-system blueprint made that direction tangible.
AGENTIC EXPERIENCE DEMONSTRATION
I presented and demoed the agentic experience and product line at Money 20/20 in Las Vegas, white-labeled. This was a concept demonstration using mock data, not a live-product launch.
REFLECTION
What this project changed about my design practice
I used to assume complexity came primarily from the amount of information on screen. This project showed me that complexity often comes from years of decisions accumulating without one consistent experience model. The harder question wasn't how to display more. It was deciding what the platform could remember for the user: their role, context, filters, priorities, and next action. It also reinforced that modernization is an exercise in restraint: replacing everything would have ignored the value already embedded in the platform. The more responsible path was to preserve domain depth while creating a clearer, more reusable experience layer around it.