making fintech suck a little less: redesigning annuities management .
Pacific Life is a financial services company bringing life insurance and annuities to end clients through their main customer, the financial advisor.
To meet their customer’s needs, stand out from the competition, and scale efficiently, Pacific Life decided to undertake a digital transformation across their product line, with the goal of a 100% digital experience, catered to their customer’s needs. I was brought on to drive one of the first transformations: redesigning the contract management portal for financial advisors to manage their clients’ Pacific Life contracts.
Timeline
8 weeks
Role
UX Designer
Team
Product Manager
UX Designer
Business Analyst
the background.
Many current day processes that financial advisors use to manage their clients’ contracts are very manual, not able to be completed online, and often require paper forms and human oversight. While this is frustrating for advisors, it is also costly and not scalable for Pacific Life.
Furthermore, advisors will often call for information or transactions that are available online, simply because they didn’t know it was accessible or couldn’t figure out how to use it correctly.
goals.
Bring all transactions online.
Redesign the navigation and information architecture to promote discoverability.
Reduce calls to customer service.
the research.
When I came on to the team, initial empathy interviews had been conducted and personas created. I absorbed the information, got into the headspace of our two main users, Allen and Hina, and conducted my own heuristic analysis.
Allen: the Financial Advisor
I work in a small office and share an assistant, so when I’m not meeting with clients I’m usually performing tasks to manage their portfolios.
Hina: the Assistant
I work in a large office supporting multiple advisors. My day is packed performing financial transactions, submitting forms and paperwork, and calling to check on the status of transactions.
ideation.
I was tasked with redesigning the contract list and started with a multi-dimensional filter and sort system with column headers based on survey results of users’ most desired data points.
5 testers | usability testing via prototype
testing | round 1.
goals:
Does the labeling resonate?
Are these the data points you care about most?
Does this filtering capability help you find the information you need?
results:
80%
use search over filters
“I just search for the
client’s last name.”
analysis.
My biggest takeaway from the first round of testing was that we weren’t asking ourselves the right questions.
We know users come to our contract management portal to complete specific tasks on a predictable schedule.
And now we know they search for their client’s by name to accomplish these tasks.
How might we make it easier for users to accomplish their tasks?
A-ha! Categories.
Like Spotify or Netflix, we can surface the clients that users are most likely to be searching for in categories that align with the tasks they have to accomplish!
iteration.
To ease users into this new experience, we considered one category pulling in the contracts they’re most likely to need based on the known tasks, sitting above their full list in table format.
managing stakeholders.
These categories were a completely new idea in an industry that has seen little change in the last 150 years; long-time employees were still adjusting to the incorporation of the fax machine.
To get stakeholders on board I told the story of our users and our research, finally sharing our low fidelity ideation of how we might allow our advisor persona, Allen, to accomplish his tasks more easily.
Storytelling for the win!
6 testers | usability testing via lo-fi prototype
testing | round 2.
goals:
Would users understand this category layout?
What labeling fits their mental models?
Would they favorite contracts?
results:
100%
weren’t clear on the labels!
83%
found Category Layout helpful
66%
loved Favorites
While the structure of the design went well, some of the labels we were using to identify the contracts that were being pulled into the Suggested Category were not clear to users. In our next round of iteration I ran multiple label options by the customer service reps and internal wholesalers who work closely with our financial advisors to get a gauge of how clear they would be.
ship it!
Suggested Category, pulling in most likely to be viewed contracts.
Five column sortable list showing new fields that users care about.
Search in upper right with filtered search options.
Exportable list in Excel or CSV, with 13 data columns, for those who still need it.
White space!
Handoff
While frequent design shares with our development team and other stakeholders prepped our engineers, this delivery still required a lengthly technical specification file determining the rules and constraints for the flags that would bring contracts into the suggested category, as well as the sorting behavior and search functionality that would apply to the contract list.
begging forgiveness.
While the team was instructed to focus on desktop based on research pointing to current user behavior, we still designed in a responsive manner with a mobile future in mind.
Maybe our current users don’t access the portal via mobile because it’s unusable, not because they don’t want to?
results + next steps.
Redesigned contract management portal released to a group of 500 beta testers — usability and satisfaction improved.
Clear labeling reduced confusion and improved navigation and discoverability.
Suggested category was facilitated faster task accomplishment.
what’s coming.
Beta tester feedback sessions
Expanded portal functionality:
Diving into contract details
Performing trades
Making a withdrawal