- Available for withdrawal
- Account balance
Empowering retail investors to manage their 401(k) with confidence.
- Role
- Senior Manager, UX Design
- Years
- 2017 – 2019
- Team
- Five designers
- Scope
- Product design & strategy
Summary
Managing a 401(k) withdrawal relied heavily on support calls, and investors often felt guilty or discouraged making one. The goal: self-service, with guidance and support that lessen a withdrawal’s negative impact.
Senior Manager, UX Design, and design lead for retail investment. I managed a team of five designers, led the design sprint, and carried its findings into prototypes, testing and the company’s design system.
The design sprint
Two days, with customers in the room.
- Map
From evaluating options to finalizing a withdrawal
I led a two-day workshop, a modified Google Ventures design sprint, with customers, designers, engineers, stakeholders, subject-matter experts and product managers. Teams mapped the journey: evaluate, prepare, initiate, finalize.
- Jobs
What people need, feel, and want to be seen as
Jobs-to-be-Done uncovered the functional, emotional and social side of each decision. On the wall: confident, in control, able to provide for family.
- Riley
Sketch the perfect journey
Teams sketched the perfect journey for a scenario. On Riley’s Road the question was: why is it so difficult to know where to start, or who to talk to?
- Friction
Pain points, phase by phase
Pinned to each phase: “Unclear how long process will/should take.” “Too much paperwork.” “Ability to compare new and old plans.”
The withdrawal overview
Put the options beside the account.
Key concepts: self-service for the whole account, including withdrawals; tools to understand a withdrawal’s impact and explore alternatives; financial wellness and goal setting; and emotionally supportive language.
You’ve worked hard for
your savings.
Now keep your savings
working hard for you.
Rebuilt in code from the legible parts of the original. The photograph behind the hero is not reproduced.
Investors often felt guilty or discouraged making a withdrawal, so the overview opens with emotionally supportive language.
The amount available to withdraw and the full account balance, together, above a clear way in.
The options are introduced together, with one place to start. Guidance and financial wellness concepts give the decision a broader context.
Testing
Finding the balance was only half the story.
Nine of ten participants found their total account balance, but only six went straight there. Completion alone would have hidden the problem.
Regular tests confirmed or falsified each idea. One showed people might not know where the withdrawal flow even started, so we restructured part of the sitewide navigation, and its words.
Navigation test · ten participants
Found their total account balance directly
Found it, but only after backtracking
Did not find it
What testing changed
Take a withdrawal, not a distribution.
Leading the team
Carry the patterns into the wider design system.
As UX design lead and Senior Manager, I managed a team of five designers and contributed to T. Rowe Price’s company-wide design system.
My team met weekly with the other design chapters across the innovation lab, so every innovation could benefit the whole group.
Credits
- Role
- Senior Manager, UX Design · UX design lead, retail investment
- Team
- Five designers
- Work
- Design sprint facilitation, user research, product strategy, design system
- Worked with
- Product managers, engineers, customer support, subject-matter experts
- Tools
- Sketch, InVision, Miro, Jira
- Years
- 2017 – 2019
The opening scene draws on the 2018 overview: its ring and a dusk sky after the hero photograph. The motion is illustrative. Figures in the overview are sample data from the original design.