Morningstar - Goal planning

My team was tasked with building a product for financial advisors to help create financial goal plans for new and existing clients. Market research showed there was a great opportunity to build upon our current platform of investing software.  

User Problems

“We’ve struggled with the integration of a lot of different products into our planning process. I call it ‘financial twister.’  Eventually, you're pretty overextended and it's hard to tell a cohesive story. We’re looking for software that can bring those tasks together into one workflow.” - quote from an advisor interview

“There's so much information and content out there, it's really a question of how can I trust and derive confidence from all of that.” - quote from an investor interview

Competitive Research

I started by researching our competitors in the goal planning market and exploring their software. The market was dominated by two platforms with a handful of others making up the remaining segment. I documented the advantages and disadvantages of each and presented my findings to stakeholders.

Discovery

Then, working with the user research team, we interviewed advisors and investors to better understand the problems that these groups were having in their financial goal gathering process. We also asked advisors about the on-boarding of new clients to learn about their process and how they use their software tools.

Here are two key findings we discovered in this research: 1) clients usually don’t want to get too far into the details about their plan; 2) advisors want an interface that’s simple enough to share with their clients in a meeting.

As a result of this research, we created several advisor personas to help guide our design process. During our goals workshop, I presented our findings and worked with the team to align on the problems we needed to solve.

Ideation

We workshopped a conceptual map of the advisors workflow, identified user objectives for each step and created a process flow map for each of our personas. We then ideated on how each of these steps might be completed. The details of the workflow were complex and the sketches below helped us think through the connections between the jobs to be done.

Solution

Based on the design documents our team put together, as well as a more detailed list of user stories I groomed with the product owner, I went through several rounds of wireframe creation, iterating based on feedback from design reviews and user testing. The goal was to create an interface that simply presented the necessary data points so that the presentation wouldn’t seem overwhelming when an advisor was working with their client.

After the completion of the wireframes, I worked closely with the other designer on my team to create the mock-ups shown below.

Outcome

We set our key success metric to have a 15% client adoption rate one year after the launch of the MVP product. The team also tracked usage data, such as time on screen, to look for opportunities to improve the experience.