USAA Wealth Management Storefront and Digital Experience

This page contains two projects that are very inter-related and help tell a much more cohesive story.

Wealth Management Storefront

Background

“The mission of the association is to facilitate the financial security of its members, associates, and their families through provision of a full range of highly competitive financial products and services” - USAA Mission

Sticking true to their mission of “facilitating the financial security of their membership” USAA is opening up their eligibility for wealth management and financial advice services to a broader pool of membership. USAA believes that no matter how much money a member may have, they are entitled to financial advice. In order to understand how to provide a better 1 : 1 financial advice experience with our membership, the best place to begin is by asking our members.

The Ask

We were asked by the business to create a better wealth management experience as they open up eligibility to a larger pool of members…that was it. Really what they wanted was a nicer looking homepage for wealth management. A big part of this project was identifying the problems that design could facilitate solving from speaking to members and communicate that value to the business.

My Role

My role on this project was leading UX Design and Research. Visual Design is done by Madisson Staires and John Fransella.

Audit of the Current Experience

The current USAA wealth management page is an utter cluster-f*** (For a lack of a better word). Pretty much a complete lack of focus on information architecture, content, and hierarchy of information. Even when the member found the wealth management page, they still didn’t understand what is was actually communicating. This page tells you nothing about what wealth management is and then prompts the member to “Get Started.”

Research Process

We start by bringing members into the design studio at generative and evaluative stages of research. We seek to understand what their current mental model is of their finances and where potential gaps in their understanding or experiences may exist. We begin the process by documenting our assumptions and what we understand to be true. This, alongside competitive market evaluation greatly influences what questions we ask. At the initial generative research phase we aim to attain greater understanding of the mental models our members hold, and what assumptions that we have that they can help validate or dispel.

Synthesis of research

Key utterances from members were used to form themes that we found throughout our research phase. We ended up with about 42 themes — to make this information more digestible, we further synthesized those themes into design principles that helped drive concepting. These principles became major criteria used to evaluate which concepts we wanted to test with members.

Pain-points were also used to help drive value statement building with our business partners and lay the foundation for concept creation.

Problem

Our research with both USAA members and USAA advisors pointed a light that there is a huge gap in the awareness and acquisition phase of the 1:1 relationship journey. More specifically, we heard that members are often unaware of USAA’s wealth management services, cannot find information on the service and/or the information they do find isn’t helpful.

Members that have had long-standing relationships with wealth management expressed that it is hard to follow the 70 or so page plan that an advisor lays out. They wanted something that they could track digitally to ensure they are on track.

Mapping the Journey

This is a lot to take in but this is a critical piece of the process. We mapped out what the ideal wealth management / financial advice journey should look like based off of our research. We overlaid pain-points (transparent red circles) along the journey in order to make them more contextually understood. Complementary to the pain-points we, mapped out design fundamentals that could help alleviate these areas of pain.

Value statements, help design align and communicate to our partners and we included these statements in context of a journey because the other function that value statements serve is to allow for measurability of success over these many phases of the journey. THEN and only then do we begin to map capabilities that we believe help enable the success of the member at every stage that alleviate the pain-points, align to value statements, and are driven by contextual design fundamentals (wow, what a mouthful!)

Mapping Concepts along the Journey

I will start by saying we did not show the member all of these concepts (not even close to that number), BUT one way to help narrow down the 8-10 concepts we did show to members was to map out all of the concepts along the journey. In doing so, the concepts that we did show members are representational of an entire journey, addressing different phases and pain-points.

Concept Zoom

Two examples of concepts that were surprising with how they tested with members were Face-to-Face and Future Casting. The business kept stressing how absolutely paramount video chat is with members since they closed down financial centers. When we spoke to 12 members, nearly everyone rated the value this experience provides as fairly low. A handful of members said that the only video that would be helpful is a screen-sharing capability so advisors can walk them through certain tasks.

Future-Casting was another example of a concept that surprised us when tested. Essentially what this concept does is looks at members spending (with their permission) and can pretty accurately predict certain life events. The example we were given from advisors we talked with was that banks can predict divorces before the other spouse can because of certain spending trends. This concept was really a mixed bag when we dove into it. There are certain things like in the example below; predicting a new member of the family, that members actually found REALLY creepy, but on the other hand; members responded very positively to a scenario where your account notices a potential job loss and automatically readjusts your plan. With this concept it came down to content strategy around the system’s contextual awareness.

For all of our concepts we used the Jobs to be done format, really focussing in on what the member is operationally trying to achieve at each step.

Two concepts that tested very well which carried over to our final concept were “Digital Action Plan” and “Exploring the Hub”. Both of these concepts came out of our generative research phase. Members who used wealth management continuously brought up how they love having a relationship with a wealth manager, but tracking progress and staying on track of goals is so difficult because there isn’t any way to cohesively track these items once the call ended. Those discussions helped give design the fuel to make the argument with the business that the storefront redesign is only half of the picture — this issue needs a digital augmentation that goes beyond what is just ‘legally’ required.

Example from the journey

From Design Thinking to Design Doing

The solution that our membership needed was two-fold:

1. They need a storefront that is not only easy to find, but also one that articulates clearly the value that financial advice provides for their personal financial situation.

   Most members don’t know what wealth management is, let alone why it is important — and how it fits into their bigger financial picture.

2. Once they enter into a financial advice/wealth management relationship they need a way to digitally augment the experience they are receiving over the phone.

   USAA’s bread and butter is relationship building, they are continuously recognized as best-in-class in customer service and support. Yet their digital experiences fall short; drastically short — creating very inconsistent and incongruous experiences.

   
   

System Architecture

Wealth Management Storefront

The most apparent fix that needed to be made was better page architecture that has clear value proposition — one that is more information-hierarchical and fee transparent…also one that doesn’t hurt the eyes to look at….so we did just that. This was the one of the two pieces that needed to happen in order to create a more cohesive experience.

Low Fidelity Generation and Iteration

It may be the industrial designer in me, but I start every initial ideation phase with paper and pen. I do a handful of these types of sketches before jumping on the computer. Sketching allows me to do very quick explorations of ideas that I may think are a little bit out there — but gives me a way to very quickly capture those ideas without using a single megabyte.

First Release of Final Design

There is still a lot of functionality to be added to this experience. The most immediate need was identified in page architecture and clarity. In the current build of this page, we have identified areas where we can augment the interaction. In some of those initial sketched I illustrated the need to to have a on-boarding and sandbox feature built in to not only showcase our capability, but also help put the member immediately in the headspace of planning. These upgrades will be made the cycle.

Wealth Management Hub

One big problem that we uncovered, as mentioned earlier, is that members will have an amazing experience with a wealth manager / financial advisor on the phone, but the second that phone call ends there is nothing to in place to digitally augment that experience. Member’s found that progress and even being able to follow progress on goals as nearly impossible to track because with the lack of digital artifacts supporting this experience, their plan remains an abstraction.

We found that events in member’s lives continuously engender the need to to make edits and revisions to their existing plan. In the past they would have to call their wealth manager, go through their existing plan, make changes and then receive a new plan (in the form of a 70 page document). One key feature of this hub is that it gives members the ability to run what-if scenarios and play around with the numbers for their goals. If they feel compelled by a certain simulation, they are able to easily send it over to their advisor/planner to be reviewed. This cuts down a tremendous amount of time because rather than having this entire process be over the phone (which becomes incredibly time-consuming), half of this experience is something a member can do whenever they want from the comfort of their own device. It takes something that is incredibly formal. Not only is it more convenient and empowering, but when giving members the ability to play around with their own financial situation digitally, it facilitates greater comprehension of their finances.

Integrations of the Storefront

There a some very clear next steps to this part of the project that are being worked on for the second iteration of the storefront. In an effort to make this more cognitively accessible, one major item we are including in the next iteration is an animated explanatory video. A lot of members we spoke to during the interviews also had expressed the value and comprehension that video provides.

In our continuing efforts to make this experience more personalized, there are efforts to include integration to the financial information of a member so USAA knows immediately what service suits them best. In the interim we are creating an integrated survey to help guide members through the process of knowing which service is best for them.

Next Steps

As we mapped out what the now, next and future phase of this work is the next steps for the storefront are creating more integrative experience with the member’s USAA account to make it easier to inform them of their eligibility. Leveraging a robust on-boarding and sandbox trial experience that helps members feel empowered to take ownership of their finances is a big part of the initiative to expand this experience to broader membership. We want to take as much legwork away from advisors as the first line of defense if the experience and need can be extended digitally.

For the Wealth Management Hub, the next step is rolling it out to a select group of membership and conduct in house user testing