Professional work ยท NDA-sanitized

Finacle Knowledge Portal

Five years of research, redesign and quiet advocacy on Finacle's global support portal. This is the sanitized version of that work, since the real thing is under NDA.

Role

Sole UX owner across research, IA, visual design and feature strategy

Scale

Global partner bank network, 60,000+ knowledge articles

Status

Live in production

60,000+knowledge articles on the portal
4 to 5xincrease in usable feedback (Liferay era)
This is Infosys and Finacle's production support portal. The process, decisions and outcomes below are real. Screens shown are rebuilt with fictional branding and content so nothing proprietary is exposed. Bank names are anonymized throughout.

Where it started

The Finacle Support Center portal is where partner bank IT teams raise tickets, search a knowledge base of 60,000+ articles, and get walked through the platform. I've spent years on this portal, first on Liferay, then through a migration to BMC Helix, and I've owned the UX end to end: research, information architecture, visual design and the ongoing fight to get good ideas actually shipped.

I also personally walked close to 2,000 people, bank IT teams and partners across the globe, through the portal so they knew how to actually use it, and I played a lead role in FSC critique sessions where the team pulled apart what wasn't working.

The Liferay eraSmall fixes that added up

A critique session I helped run surfaced a string of small but real friction points. None of them were glamorous. All of them were things a user would silently work around instead of reporting.

๐Ÿ”—

Too many new tabs

Nearly every catalogue and nav item opened in a new tab, and that included the feedback widget itself. Users dropped off before they even reached it.

2 to 3 feedback entries a month
๐Ÿ’ฌ

Feedback moved in page

I redesigned the feedback flow as an overlay instead of a new tab, and pulled navigation back into a single site.

12 to 16 a month after
๐Ÿ“„

Pagination without a page count

Search results only had back and next, so jumping to page 7 meant clicking through 6 first. I asked the technical team to show total pages up front.

๐ŸŽฌ

Video thumbnails

Each product's short training videos had a title but no thumbnail. I suggested thumbnails and handed over a working proof of concept.

๐Ÿ“

File size up front

Downloadable documents didn't show their size until you opened them. I pushed to surface it next to the file name, so a 12MB download is obvious before you click it.

None of these were expensive to build. What they had in common was that nobody had gone looking for them until someone actually sat with users and watched where they got stuck.

ResearchListening to the banks who used it every day

I ran in person research with IT teams at several partner banks. The complaint was almost always the same shape: they knew the knowledge base was huge, but they couldn't get to the right article without a lot of trial and error.

I brought that back to the technical team and we built a search tips and tricks guide, then ran webinars across regions walking banks through how to actually search well. On a monthly sync call, a Finacle SPOC told us the tips had directly helped their team resolve issues faster on their own.

The goal wasn't to redesign search from scratch. It was to close the gap between "the answer exists" and "the user can actually find it," with the smallest possible change: better guidance, and visibility into how much more there was to look through.

From the search tips & tricks guide
1

Wrap exact phrases in double quotes โ€” "insufficient funds" finds that phrase together, not each word separately.

2

Use two or three specific keywords rather than a long descriptive sentence.

3

Concatenate multi-word terms into one string when the exact match matters, e.g. "errorcode123" instead of "error code 123".

4

Add % before or after a keyword to catch related and partial matches you'd otherwise miss.

5

Apply the product filter before searching, so results aren't diluted across every module.

Feature restorationRestoring the compatibility matrix

The compatibility matrix was one of the features that quietly didn't survive the move from Liferay. It told banks which operating systems, databases and app servers worked with which Finacle product, and it existed on the old portal, but nobody had explicitly signed off on dropping it. It just didn't make the migration.

I took that finding back to the team and pushed to rebuild it ahead of general release, rather than wait for banks to notice it missing and raise tickets about it. While rebuilding it, I also changed how it worked: instead of one long table with a dropdown filter, users now pick their product catalogue first, then download the matrix from inside it.

Same information, organized around how someone actually starts the task: they know their product before they know their OS version.

Compatibility Checker, catalog view

Platform migrationWhy we moved to BMC Helix

Liferay split knowledge management and ticket raising across two portals with two separate logins. Moving to BMC Helix meant single sign on: one login, tickets and knowledge base in the same place, one click away from each other instead of a context switch.

I owned the information architecture for the migration, wireframing every screen from the landing page onward, so the move wasn't just a lift and shift of old content onto a new platform.

Shipped on BMC HelixMy Favorites, at 60,000 article scale

With over 60,000 knowledge articles on the portal, the real problem wasn't finding an article once. It was finding that same article again three months later. I designed and shipped My Favorites: a pin that lets each user save up to 200 articles for instant recall, so they never have to re-search for something they'd already solved before.

A small feature on paper, but it came directly from watching how people actually use a knowledge base that size: not by browsing, but by returning to the handful of articles that matter to their environment.

My Favorites screen, pinned knowledge articles

Holding the lineThe notification banner

Planned maintenance and technical advisories only ever showed up as a notification bell with an unread count, the kind of thing most people learn to ignore. I proposed a high contrast ribbon banner on the homepage instead, sitting directly above the search bar, since search is the first thing every logged in user goes to.

Internal stakeholders pushed back. It duplicated the bell icon, and a bold red banner wasn't seen as polished. I made the call to prioritize usability over how it looked, and shipped it anyway.

Through our Finacle SPOC, well over a dozen partner banks โ€” 12 to 17 by our count โ€” specifically said they'd seen the banner and thanked us for the advance notice.

The banner only appears for genuinely important notices, not every day, so that number reflects specific incidents rather than a usage rate. It's a decision that outside feedback ended up validating, not internal opinion about aesthetics.

Same portal, same search bar, one addition that most users will only ever see a handful of times, exactly when it matters.

Support center homepage with maintenance ribbon above search

Built with AI assistanceThe Knowledge Base Suite

Every month, thousands of tickets get logged, spanning production, UAT, development, testing, clarification requests and duplicates. Nobody had a systematic way to see which knowledge gaps were actually costing the most support time. So I built one.

01

Ticket analysis

Surfaces which gaps deserve a new article first, based on real ticket volume.

02

Keyword quality

Shows where users are searching with the wrong terms, so we know what to teach them.

03

User behavior

Tracks how each bank is actually using the knowledge base, and where they're struggling.

It took two to three weeks of iterating on the logic to get it useful, and I'm still optimizing it. I recently presented it to a larger forum of support heads, who responded well. It also told us something we didn't have a clean way to see before: which partner banks were struggling most to use the portal at all.

300+
partners attended the webinars this surfaced
3
signal types feeding one view

OngoingStill in motion

A partner bank's IT team told us they couldn't make sense of the error messages appearing on screen. The messages didn't explain what had actually gone wrong with their input. I took that seriously and escalated it to the engineering teams rather than let it sit as one bank's isolated complaint.

That's now turning into two things: clearer, more human error messages for end users, and a Grafana based view where users can see the root cause and a recommended next step instead of a flat failure message. I didn't build either of those myself, and I'm not the only reason they're happening. Surfacing and pushing the feedback is the part I own.

Where it stands

All of this shipped and is live in production. This write-up is the sanitized, public facing version of it. A few numbers, like exact Knowledge Base Suite output, are still being finalized as the tool keeps improving.