Problem Statement
Find the "opportunity areas" where the client can intervene in a user's life and build a service or a product.
They were looking to evaluate its potential to become a "lifetime" partner in the financial wellness journey of its customers.
Team
A solid team of three experience designers and two strategic designers with BCG consultants went through the aggressive innovation phase for three months.
Collaborated with BCG Consultants for backing up our design approach with market analysis and cost estimate for each archetype and overall estimate on profit over time.
My Role
• Experience/Interaction Designer for product provocations
• Visual designer for Journey Maps and Product Provocations and other frameworks
• Brainstormed in Design Thinking process with Strategic Designers
• Involved in User Research with Strategic Designers
• Designed Presentation for Business Proposal for the client
Phases
• Articulate the north-star vision
• Deep dive into financial wellness and its impact on career transitions
• Validate opportunity spaces and client’s right to win
• Prepare a strategic growth story and business case for the way forward
Design Research Process
The research phase required multiple pivots throughout the process of opportunity areas.
It involved User Interviews, Personas, Clustering Pain-points, Defining Archetypes, Journey Map, Brainstorming Product Provocations, Ideating the possible solutions, Journey maps with Product Provocations, Validation of the ideas, and Business Case Proposal
User Interview
We interviewed people from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Florida, Chicago, Ohio, Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles from different age groups and different job titles to understand their financial planning.
Persona and Mapping
We clustered the user profiles on the basis of their age and job types. We then clubbed the debrief of the user interviews in similar categories and explored their pain points in their various stages of employment.
Clustering Pain-Points from User Interviews
We defined the personas and mapped them on 2x2 matrix on their income stability and where they belong on sophistication of financial ecosystem below:
INSIGHTS
We came up with three Archetypes and their understanding of Financial and Income stability:
1. "MAKE IT EASY" - People who are Retires cruisers, Freelancers, Contractors (1099).
2. "AMP ME UP "- People who were Full Time Employees or owners of their own businesses.
3. "HELP ME DO IT" - People who were Part Time Employees and Job Jugglers, and people going back to work after retirement.
User Pain Points on Journey Map of Different Archetypes
From our understanding of the users and their archetypes, we mapped the journey of different life events like employment transition phases of the personas in one flow, starting from graduation from school to retirement.
We converted the Journey Maps into a more sophisticated layout and then brainstormed on “user needs” of these archetypes in each life stage.
Job Begins
Job Transition
Pre-Retire
INSIGHTS
We saw connections between these archetypes in their life journeys. However, the needs looked different, which gave us an estimate that we might need multiple products or services for each archetype.
Journey map shown below is the result of the above-shown activity:
Defined User Personas of each archetype
We dug deeper into the personas and pulled their information from the interviews about their financial goals, their pain points, brands they use, how to reach them, their financial wellness priority and their behaviors.
INSIGHTS
The journeys for each archetype were different and gave detailed scope around points of intervention. It uncovered the possibility to have a single solution for multiple intervention points.
Moved Paint Points to Archetype Buckets
We sorted the needs on the basis of the difficulty level of their achievement. And then voted for the most important ones.
INSIGHTS
• This activity gave us an estimate on what could be the possible features to address these pain-points.
• Bringing similar pain points into a bucket helped us narrow down the spread-out list of pain points, while also considering each one of them.
Brainstormed Product Provocations
Looking at the most important needs, we created low-fidelity paper wireframes (Product provocations) in the form of a single feature, notification, service or an app.
User Interviews and Validation of Product Provocation
With our product provocations, we did a second round of user interviews and proposed these solutions to the users to see how they engage with these provocations and how they feel about it.
Defined the types of Product Provocations and their Characteristics
Mapping Journey with existing Platform
Going ahead we integrated the product provocations with the existing platform that the client has on the journey map. We mapped the user needs with the product provocations to the phases of employment, life transitions and scope of monetization.
Low fidelity Wireframes - Video
We integrated the low-fidelity wireframes in a video to give the client a look and feel of how might the product provocations fit in the opportunity areas :
Product/Services Proposal Idea:
"Customer for Life Portal" that includes multiple features that a user would you throughout his life journey as an employee:
• Understand Job Offer, Onboarding, Benefits offered
• Compare Benefits from multiple offers
• Set Financial Wellness Goals
• Maximize Benefits
• Retirement Readiness Score
• Plan for Retirement
• Attend Workshops
• Annual Financial Report
• Advisor helps to set goals - White Glove service
• Sign up for virtual Retirewise
• Dental, Vision or other insurance plans
• Plan for post-retirement
I designed these mock screens to make the client have a visual sense of how these features would look like:
Conclusion
1. We found our key trends and barriers impacting financial wellness of employees.
2. Another important takeaway is how major transitions in people’s life situations make them more willing to change their behavior. This willingness can translate into unique product experience and engagement models.
3. We then proposed three behavioral segments that can help identify emotional and aspirational needs of target users.
4. And finally we laid out the business case for employers to invest in financial wellness of their employees.
These product provocations with the video were presented to the client with a solid business case. The Client had to make a decision if they want to proceed with BCG Digital Ventures for bringing the idea into production.
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