Northwestern Mutual Planning Experience

Project Role: UX LEAD

Overview

For Northwestern Mutual, I provided concept design and UX design for the financial planning platform as an effort to streamline and digitize a disconnected and outdated process for thousands of financial advisors and clients. For many financial planners/advisors, the act of collecting, organizing and accessing client facts is one that is done over many analog and digital tools. We sought to streamline that process for a more simple, efficient and productive working experience.

Understanding the process and user needs

The platform had multiple user archetypes and varying user journeys depending on office size and process. It was important to capture feedback from a broad selection of users to understand what would be the best way to create a flow that was flexible and could be easily adapted to by the different users. Below are sketches and diagrams charting out the journey and user archetypes and needs based on user interviews and office observations.

EXPLORATION OF CONCEPTS

Designing and creating 3 framework concepts allowed us to test our assumptions on financial advisors’ needs based on our initial findings and field observations. These ideas widely differed so that we could test various task mental models prevalent between the offices we visited and users we interviewed.

USER TESTING & FEEDBACK CYCLES

User testing sessions with financial advisors across multiple cities allowed us to test diverse approaches to financial planning. During each session, we recorded our findings for each concept per user. These findings would then be synthesized and delivered to the broader team and leadership to help validate product requirements.

Creating the information architecture

Creating the information architecture to the platform required a full understanding of the financial planning process and complexity. This was made possible by collecting and synthesizing insights from interviews, field research and using forums for beta users to leave their comments, pain points and questions to the work that we share and review with them. The following site map is an example depicts the site map to the sub-section level. Each subsection may contain several input form conditionalities for client fact collection.

Building out all client fact inputs and form interaction

Through close collaboration with the financial advisors of Northwestern Mutual, we were able to audit their process and provide front-end translation. I started with the most important high level tasks and gradual progression towards designing for details and numerous conditionalities that existed within each section of data.

from beta to launch

The BETA build was designed using existing company design patterns used for other enterprise apps and software. Using these patterns were quick to implement, but lacked the interactive patterns and UI elements needed for our ever-updating platform. We started to create custom patterns and guidelines for usage for new features as well as evolving older ones and eventually developed a new design system.

v1 WIREFRAME ITERATION FOR CLIENT FACT SCREEN DURING BETA

v2 WIREFRAME ITERATION FOR CLIENT FACT SCREEN approaching launch date

creation of THE luna design system

As we developed the platform into Beta, I worked closely with front-end developers and a visual designer to build out a system based on patterns and interactions that were realized during the interaction audit. I tracked the design system build and authored the design system goals, principles, annotations and usage guidelines. The system would eventually be applied to the platform and all internal app functions.