Understanding client needs in working with FA’s
product strategy & design research
Overview
The Problem
Our product and design team proposed a workshop to step back and focus on the why of one of AI Lab’s services. While we were familiar with the pressures facing financial advisors, our client-centric focus of “engagement” lacked a foundation in the client experience specifically for new entrants into financial planning. We needed to understand these types of clients and how they worked with financial advisors in order to better serve the client experience in that relationship.
My Role
I was the Lead UX Designer and Researcher working with one product manager, our UX intern and the partner team. My responsibilities included:
Developing and managing the research plan
Recruiting, screening, and facilitating user interviews
Synthesizing and presenting insights to internal team and clients
Create persona and journey map deliverables
Background
Planning or maintaining a financial future starts as a dependent and continues through retirement. The decision to engage a financial advisor typically occurs when financial aspirations become complex. For some individuals, this begins early in their working life, when increased income allows saving. It was important to include clients at this stage of their journey, as it allowed us to understand their needs when choosing between self management, robo-advisors, and human advisors. We did not focus on those users who are in later stages of financial planning, as their behaviors and interactions with advisors are already shaped by their personal advisor-client relationship.
Looking at the life journey of a client we decided to focus on users in the stages in bold:
Dependent
Young Income Earner
Young Saver
Starting a Family
Saving for Family Goals
Spending on Family Goals
Retirement
Process
Exploration
After brainstorming with our client, we developed four key topic areas to focus our objectives and research questions:
Communication - How productive is contact with my advisor?
Empowerment - Are there actions that I personally want to take?
Financial Literacy - What responsibility do I have vs my advisor to ensure I am literate?
Performance - How well do I understand my current financial picture?
Discovery
Early in synthesis, it became apparent that performance and empowerment were closely related — understanding the performance of investments was one of the steps to empowering clients to make decisions. A new theme also emerged that was previously not considered — the need for clients to feel trust in the decisions that they or the Financial Advisor (FA) are making. We adjusted our research plan and decided to further explore this topic in our interviews. Because our team worked remotely (PM in New York, partner in Philadelphia, myself in San Francisco) I decided to use Mural to involve our team in the synthesis process. AI Labs had their own design team, but had never conducted user centered research before. I enjoyed the opportunity to enroll them in affinity mapping and share with them what’s possible with some of the many tools available for remote research.
After grouping patterns, we identified variables that started to surface and mapped participants on a scale to give us clarity into where there was over-lap for similar user behaviors and attitudes. This exercise helped to identify our personas, and where there might be outliers that require additional research.
Creation
Personas and Journey Maps
Because AI Labs was new to research, I worked closely with their PM and design team to help them understand that these are living, changing documents that help visualize insights and remind us who we are designing for.
Post Research Overview
Our final deliverable to AI Labs was a summary of our key insights, journey maps, and product strategy areas. Here is a glance of the presentation I put together and presented to the team at the conclusion of our engagement.
Reflection
Next Steps
Keeping our user needs at the center of our discussion, my PM and I brainstormed potential opportunity areas for AI Lab’s product directions. This also gave us the opportunity to discuss next steps to engage with the client in a phase 2 statement of work — design & build.
