The Managed Investment Account is a robo-advisor product, for investors who are looking for a fully digital solution to manage their investment portfolio on their behalf. Through the development of this product, I have acted as the lead designer and design manager to 2 more junior design team members.
Mobile and desktop views of Account Overview dashboard
The process
I started the discovery process with exploratory research focused on understanding the core attributes of our customer. Because this is a new product build, we did not have an existing customer base to engage with when it came to UX research. To create a hypothesis on who our potential customers might be, I worked with several internal stakeholders to identify the key characteristics and behaviors of the users we expect to enroll in the Managed Investment Account.
The business has a strategic goal with this product to retain customers who are leaving their John Hancock 401K after changing jobs. With the 401K customer funnel in mind, I also engaged with the call center that supports the 401K plan, to understand the goals and behaviors of those users.
Based on those stakeholder interviews, our team crafted a proto-persona to ground the team in who we are designing/building for as we define the product.
Based on those stakeholder interviews, our team crafted a proto-persona to ground the team in who we are designing/building for as we define the product.
Based on those stakeholder and support team interviews, some themes emerged:
• The typical customer who rolls over from a 401K account does not have a high level of financial acumen. They are looking for guidance and want to feel like they are making a smart decision when rolling over their retirement investments
• Pain points include a lack of trust in financial institutions and a concern that they do not adequately understand the available options when making decisions related to their retirement savings.
Proto-persona definition slide from a research share-out that I presented to the team
Product onboarding
With our proto-persona in mind, design began to work on the sketching out the user experience. Product onboarding was a critical focus for our team. Given the insights we had gathered about our customers, we focused our efforts in keeping the enrollment questions as straightforward as possible, offering additional context or information in moments that might prove challenging. The team and I tested several iterations of this flow to eventually arrive at an experience that tested well with a lookalike audience.
Mobile onboarding wireframes
Mobile onboarding hi-fidelity designs
Post-enrollment experience
To understand what features would be most valuable to users enrolled in the product, I lead the team in running a prioritization matrix exercise. To start, our team sourced a list of potential product features through competitive analysis and feedback from customer surveys from a similar product. Once we had a list of potential features, we asked a group of test participants (aligned to our proto-persona) to rank each one based on importance and the frequency that they would want to access the feature.
The result was a prioritized list of potential features. Our design team shared these results with business stakeholders and, together with the product owner, allowed this ranking to guide our MVP feature set.
Mobile and desktop views of the Transaction History page
Looking ahead
The Managed Investment Account is scheduled to launch mid-2022. Once live, our team will continue to iterate on the user experience, with real customer feedback driving our roadmap. I am proud of the work my design team put into this product launch and we are all excited to see how the Managed Investment Account may evolve and improve once in-market.