Empowering financial wellness at Fidelity
How might we help those struggling to make ends meet feel empowered to take small steps to achieve financial wellness and stay engaged?
Note: Due to the confidential nature of the firm, I’ve omitted some details and altered some images. More details about my work at Fidelity can be shared in a small group presentation.
Context
Redefining financial wellness
While Fidelity has a wide offering of financial wellness experiences and products, it lacks clear navigation, meaningful connection, and our point of view on how someone should achieve financial wellness in the eyes of Fidelity.
Problem
Too many questions, for little results
The existing financial wellness checkup is an outdated one that leaves customers on a poorly designed page, causing confusion and uncertainty.
Outcome
Increased completion rate by 15% and saw 40% engagement on content
Reimagining the financial wellness checkup resulted in doubled engagement and increased completion rate. Now customers can quickly move through the experience and “get to the point.”
Discover & define
Align the business
I crafted and lead a two-day workshop over Zoom with the goal to get all key stakeholders to identify what would be in MVP and what would follow, as well as educate them on our UX process to build trust and transparency. This work had started and stopped over a year. Finally, business was focused on making this a priority and there were a lot of opinions to manage. The workshop allowed all voices to be heard and align on what to focus on first.
Understand our customer
The original experience was open to all workplace investment customers, which didn’t make sense to those who were financially sound. We focused the new experience to meet the needs of someone who we tend to ignore—someone who is struggling financially. We call them the “juggler” and they make up about 30% of Fidelity’s total customers.
Based on research done at the corporate level, their typical financial characteristics are:
Aware of their spending but feel frustrated that they can never seem to catchup
They know the importance of paying down debt but don’t have much of a cushion for necessities.
They find financial professionals intimidating, so they turn to their friends and family for help.
Design & iterate
What it was
The original experience ask customers 26 detailed questions. There was a high drop off rate of 47% at the third page. If customers did make it to their “action plan” it was unclear of what they needed to do first to fix their score. Furthermore, the old experience didn't meet accessibility standards.
Mobile-first, low fi-designs
We had design requirements of how the question pages should be laid out. So we focused on design attention on getting the “action plan” page organized and tactical.
Rapid testing
We conducted a quick usability test with six users (via usertesting.com) to see if they understood the order of which to complete the steps, if there were any pain points, as well as preference of certain elements. This resulted in numerous design decisions that helped inform the final design, such as:
Numbering the steps isn’t helpful—users understood that was at the top was the first step to complete
Seeing all the steps would be overwhelming and could result in decreased engagement. They wanted a balance of knowing what is next but not showing everything.
Design & iterate
Page anatomy
As we continued to move into higher fidelity, I decided to create an anatomy visual of our design aligned to user feedback.
It was where I started all my conversations, to level set and visualize the why behind these decisions, and that it was designed with intention and backed by user feedback. And that really helped in tough conversations where sometimes, some people just didn’t like it. Or had a difference of opinions.
*Due to the confidential nature of the work, I cannot share the full experience.
Outcomes
Following the launch of the experience, we saw an increased completion rate by 15% and saw 40% engagement on content. This increase can be directly tied back to the new designs, reduction in number of question pages and new action plan that made it clear of what a customer should do first on their journey towards financial wellness.
