A better investment strategy experience
Revamping a key investment strategy experience, which also happens to be the most complex UX challenge I’ve ever taken on.
To comply with my confidentiality agreement I have omitted and changed certain information. Some designs may be a reinterpretation of the original.
Financial advisors at Company X need a streamlined process for guiding clients through investment recommendations and solution implementation. The problem was their existing workflow, which was outdated, time-consuming and prone to system failures. The company’s primary investment planning tool, which serves thousands of advisors and customers and receives 1.5 million visits annually, desperately needed a revamp. I was part of the small agile team tasked with reimagining this crucial experience.
Discovery
One of the many challenges of this project was that the experience needed to support three different types of advisor, dealing with three different types of client. Personas were created to help familiarize the team with the different roles and ensure we kept their varied needs top of mind.
The existing investment planning experience was quite complex, made all the more so by the three different advisor types with three different client groups, three different regulatory constraints, and three different paths through the experience. After many user interviews and observation sessions, we managed to capture those three paths along with pain points and opportunities:
Looking for more complexity? Don’t worry - there are also over 22 distinct use cases for this experience, with each use case potentially varying depending on the customer’s relationship to the company, their account type(s), whether those accounts are funded, whether those accounts exist elsewhere, and whether they have previously established goals or investment strategies with the company.
Through several advisor interviews we identified the distinct use cases, bucketed them, and created scenarios that would help us address the additional factors at play.
Early ideation
To help move the team from the Discovery phase into Ideation, we organized a Google Design Sprint around one of our core use cases:
This Google Design Sprint was held during the early days of the pandemic, so we had to adapt quickly to remote collaboration. Luckily, my mural templates came in handy.
I created a shared PowerPoint template with editable components so that 1.) everyone could prototype and 2.) we could break into smaller groups and simultaneously work on the same file.
The big insight revealed during the design sprint was that advisors preferred to ask more questions upfront, as opposed to having them sprinkled throughout the experience. Advisors strongly believed that asking all questions upfront would reduce redundancies, create a more natural flow, and make the client feel heard and understood.
Fleshing out the (many) different scenarios
I used our design sprint insight as the starting point for scenario wireframing. I kept the sketches purposely rough and met with advisors weekly to get feedback and collaboratively refine them. Below is a sample of that work:
Creating MVP
Due to a new regulatory requirement at the time, our MVP needed to focus on the Managed Account recommendation scenario. I created this experience while simultaneously sketching out the end-to-end future state, and made sure that MVP components could be reused down the line.
The Target Allocation Fund and Target Date Fund recommendation scenarios leveraged the same question-led flow and many of the same components as the Managed Account MVP.
At this point the project hit an in-house legal roadblock and needed to pivot. While it’s unfortunate when user needs are superseded, the original research we conducted was still helpful as the project took a new direction.