The Client
My client was a Canadian financial services company known for its life insurance products and wealth management services. It is one of the largest life insurance companies in the world and also has a long history.
The work I prepared is an attempt to UI-UX design the mobile application for people to find a financial advisor – completely separate from today’s corporate website. I’ve attached the story…
Requirements and Scope
The firm has more than 30,000 employees across multiple business units. Group benefits, retirement services and insurance are the three pillars of the company’s business.
The following goals were set for the company:
Focus on a single, cohesive and consistent experience for all customers
Improve functionality and usability
Overhaul the app experience using customer feedbacks
Exploring ways to encourage self-service experiences when the customer needs to find a financial advisor or needs help for financial questions
The overall goal of this initiative is to provide users with a consistent native app experience, regardless of what product they purchase, who their corporate sponsor is or what task they’re trying to accomplish.
As a UI/UX Designer I was responsible for:
Research
Information architecture
Prototyping
User testing
Visual design
I’ve worked with an agile team to create native app experience . This approach has proven valuable for our users by providing consistency and giving us a holistic view of the entire experience.
Approach and Process
I talked to the firm’s UX research team as a starting point to understand what our customers need. We developed our approach by seeking customer feedback and analytics. We conducted a competitive analysis looking at both financial and non-financial platforms to understand how some of the top companies are doing.
But our current information architecture was ineffective and confusing. Users had little idea how to navigate the ecosystem and often got frustrated trying to complete simple tasks. These tasks can be as simple as changing addresses or switching to paperless statement delivery.
We started with the card sorting exercise to find a solution to our problem.
After analyzing the results, a clear pattern emerged. We have been able to lay the foundation for an advanced information architecture that is intuitive and most importantly; serves the needs of our users.
Also I organized some workshop series to brainstorm concepts that address the issues our users are experiencing. We needed to make sure we did this while achieving the goals of our business partners.
Following this; with massive amounts of data and a direction, I worked closely with the product owner and agile development team to define user journeys and flows.
How we communicate with our users is an equal part of the overall experience. We have created a journey that allows users to complete their tasks as efficiently as possible. After finalizing the content, I started creating the storyboard for the end-to-end experience.
Early iterations of the solution were combined into a prototype to validate my assumptions which is work with hi-fi wireframes. I’ve created scenarios that ask users to complete a series of tasks like updating their address, add postal code or find and decide an advisor on their device. The test was conducted remotely via UserTesting.com with selected participants. After the testing process was complete, I took care to ask in-depth questions to assess their understanding and overall satisfaction with the experience. The responses allowed us to make the necessary changes before moving on to the high-quality design phase.
The Result
In parallel with this project, a full-fledged design system was being built in the company. This study was also the pilot and first major project to put the design system into practice. The new design system took a modular approach to the solution, rather than spending too much time forcing and redrawing pixels. The pilot was successful and this project proved to be a major impetus to use the firm’s design system on digital platforms in future projects.
We detected a significant decrease in service requests made to the customer call center shortly after launch. Common tasks such as address management, profile management and contacting an advisor can now be performed by users via the mobile app. Also, this allowed staff to focus on more complex requests and provide a better overall customer experience.