Client Discovery
Bank of Montreal (BMO)
TL;DR: I am the designer for a online client discovery tool for digital financial planning. This tool is inclusive, robust, and fun. It creates a memorable and elevated first client experience, engages clients differently to build a better and trusted relationship between clients and financial advisors.
Industry:
Finance
Role:
UI/UX Designer
Year:
2020
Problem
The volume of discovery meeting checklists and questionnaires available today attest that collecting the information required to deliver a wealth plan is arduous and time-consuming. Before familiarity and trust are established it can be impossible because many clients are understandably hesitant to expose all about their values, goals, relationships, assets, preferences, and interests. Yet, that information has become table stakes to meet basic fiduciary and suitability requirements.
Objective
Before I started, the project team had already signed a contract with a US-based vendor to provide the solution. However, the third-party tool was designed without considering our design guidelines and going through usability evaluation. There would be inherent risks in taking third party tools and applying minimal customization to them, the most detrimental ones being: creating inconsistent experiences, setting false expectations, and brand dilution. My responsibility was to deliver a redesigned tool in 90 days with full consideration of our design system, accessibility, and usability.
Results
I used the most well-known questionnaire in UX research - the System Usability Scale (SUS) to evaluate my prototype. The questionnaire was given to a participant after an entire usability testing session is over. In the final round of usability testing, the SUS score of this discovery tool had increased from 75 to 83. *A score of 73 or higher is good, whereas a score of 80 or higher is ideal for a system like this, based on stats on nngroup.com.
Design Iterations
I ran a total of three rounds of in-person testing and unmoderated online testing throughout the design process.
Here are some detail findings and how I used them to iterate the design:
Dashboard
Finding #1: Participants did not understand the visual is a snapshot of the page in each step. They found it overwhelming to see all these visual elements and buttons on one page. Adding tutorials was not helpful for the discovery process which was already time-consuming. Participants preferred a simplified process instead of watching tutorials to learn the tool.
People and relationship
Finding #2: Participants did not understand the visual is a snapshot of the page in each step. They found it overwhelming to see all these visual elements and buttons on one page. Adding tutorials was not helpful for the discovery process which was already time-consuming. Participants preferred a simplified process instead of watching tutorials to learn the tool. Participants finished the tasks to add, edit, and delete people without an issue. They thought this step was straight forward and easy to complete. The changes I made here were to follow our internal design system guideline and the latest business requirements.
Goals and priorities
Finding #3: Participants did not find the goal they want quickly as they were located in different categories. Different goal names can mean different things to people. Creating taxonomy makes it more difficult to find a goal.
Finding #4: Participants did not know where to click or interact to start adding goals to the goals "cart". And they preferred to see everything that they had selected as it would provide an overview of how their overall planning looks like. The Before version had the goal list only shown on click of the button did not meet this requirement.
Finding #5: Participants did not know what would happen if they click the timeline filter options at the bottom of the page and the horizontal scroll did not appear to be intuitive for our target users. I decided to add descriptions and Previous/Next buttons for the timeline on this page, in the meanwhile, made it visually looks like a group instead of separate elements.
Finding #6: Participants did not understand why the goal timeline changed when they tried to fill out the goal details. I assumed that the goal amount should be the focal point of this page and the three timeline options should be compressed into one to save space. However, based on our test results, participants would like to see the same view across different pages so that they did not get confused.
Cash flow and net worth
Finding #7: Participants found it overwhelming to fill out their expenses by categories and provide accurate numbers. To address that I recommended adding an option for users to add a lump sum and this can be easily estimated by looking at how much money is left in bank accounts. Because expenses could be paid monthly, quarterly, annually, I added in the flexibility of duration and provide a monthly-annual calculation to provide users a better overall picture of finance.
Finding #8: Participants did not have any issues with adding net worth items on this specific page. However, if keep adding items to the list, they lost track of how many items they added. So a collapsible group function was added to the list for users to preview added items.
Summary
Finding #9: All participants had a hard time understanding the chart of their finance and the chart of projected funding. I decided to remove the overwhelming charts from the discovery tool and keep this process simple and straightforward. When users are meeting their financial planners, they could walk through and explain the charts.
