Role: Lead Designer, Morningstar
Design :: Service & Product
Accessible Investing
Designing a financial advice service for normal people
Timeframe: 8 months
Status: service not activated; behavioral design used in multiple digital products
Scale & Org Context
Lead Designer hired specifically for this service into a team of current employees
Team: product manager, researcher, visual designer, content strategist, front end developer, 2 back end developers, 1 QA
Design: ~125 across design, research, content & ops
Product, Design and Engineering: 1,500 employees, ~60 squads
NerdWallet — a relevant Behavioral Economics and Personal Financial Management acquisition
Customer makeup: 4.2 million individual investors, 425,000 financial advisors, 125,000 private-market participants, 275,000 retirement plan sponsors, and 3,100 asset-management firms
Morningstar: $2B Public company with 7,000 employees in 2019 (11,000 today)
Challenge: Connect with a new market
Morningstar’s mission is about enabling good investing decisions for regular people through transparent analysis. They were revolutionary in the world of investing when they started.
By way of example, Morningstar is the first to create a proprietary rating system using Warren Buffet’s moats. A big deal at the time, this tool is relied on today by the industry.
All in all, a well-respected company for their current market of “regular people,” aka individual investors: aging, wealthy people who have played out their buy-and-hold.
But younger people — basically anyone in the US under 45 — mostly know Morningstar as a frozen breakfast sausage.
Brand awareness is one issue. Engagement is something else entirely.
The way regular people become individual investors doesn’t even feel like a moment that matters.
When we start a job that offers it, we choose a percent of our paychecks to go into 401ks, 403bs, or IRAs.
We set it and forget it, but we are officially individual investors now.
Because it comes out of our cash flow, investing is inextricably linked to personal financial management, or PFM. PFM is all about our decision making and behavior with money, which is governed by conscious or unconscious mental models, a concept known as behavioral economics.
Morningstar wants to attract a new, younger market of new investors but doesn’t want to touch PFM. It isn’t hubris so much as a blind spot. Everyone who works there lives and breathes this stuff. They don’t want to talk about cash. They want to talk about investing.
To attract this new market we need to meet them where they are, and make our new thing worth using to them. My challenge as a lead designer was to do just that.
Hypothesis:
If we can create a service that is easy for novice investors to use and works for all kinds of individual investors, then Morningstar will succeed at attracting a new generation of customers.
Highlights
Service Design
Product Design
Qualitative Research
Storytelling
Enterprise Design
The Context
I was hired into a rock star team.
Our product manager, a former analyst & now PM is on his 23rd year ther. He still builds his own fund portfolios that regularly beat the market. Our researcher knew the audience backward and forward after three years deep in the subject matter.
Together they persuaded product leadership to fund a new service. A visual designer and front end dev were added. Soon after that, I was hired.
After about a month, I drew out what this could look like online if it was more friendly to people who might not understand the process.
Let’s just say co-founding a wealth management firm sped things up.
I combined my UX skills with my knowledge pretty seamlessly. After all, I’d designed this before, all the way down to creating the interactive PDFs for account opening.
I matched it up to the JTBD and competitive analysis and voila, new service. Designed. Check!
Some people would put down the dry-erase marker, but I do not.
What I didn’t know was that the clock was ticking, and that there were some hidden cultural undercurrents in play.
The Problem
Choose wisely.
The customer problem we had to overcome and solve for was one that Morningstar had trouble digesting — and it’s only gotten more intense as a skeptical Gen Z has entered the workforce:
People don’t trust the markets or professionals who work in it
People aren’t hungry to learn about investing, viewing it as an opaque, complex system
People in the Millennial and Z age groups don’t believe saving money “works” (they’ll never be able to buy a house or retire)
Don’t underestimate the power of the Wall Street movies
The organizational problem was an inability to commit to a path.
The TAM for people who match the demographics of Morningstar customers in younger age brackets is much smaller than “everyone else” who needs to invest.
They continued to take runs at everyone else with small products or acquisitions, but lost interest when customer acquisition got too high.
But the dollar signs for the latter group were enormous, as you can imagine.
The Stakes
Fulfilling the mission.
Morningstar has a footprint with older investors, but it also has a big one in the financial advice market.
Financial advising and investment firms pretty much have to buy their products. Their subscriber base has a high percentage of analysts who also have to use Morningstar ratings, moats and ESG scores to do their job.
These are not people they need to spend marketing dollars reaching.
And, no shade on those products. They aren’t that usable or accessible but they get the job done.
The only problem is those markets and products don’t exactly… match the mission.
The service we were going to build did.
It had all the warm fuzzy stuff going for it — education, use of IP, a gateway into a market that fit the mission clearly.
We were hailed as a dream team building the future of Morningstar (at the expense of other hard-working teams trying to do the same).
The Ask
Broadening my focus made this into a service, not a product.
Once I started to dig in more, the researcher on the team introduced me to one of our behavioral economists.
She had come over from a PFM acquisition that was about to be divested. She deeply understood what held people back from getting started with saving or investing.
We used theories she shared with us to do agile rounds of prototyping and research that got us to an amazing, plain language, mobile-first customer onboarding process.
Because we were using theory and working with PFM — which was now a bad acronym at Morningstar — I used every storytelling technique I had to persuade people that we were building the right thing.
I started building out phases of the service in sketches and reviewing the whole thing with the entire team before we started work on that phase. I also got the whole team to listen to research sessions and we would discuss them.
We pushed the design system by adding a new typescale, which was unheard of in the design team.
It was the most high functioning, aligned team I’ve ever worked on, and I contributed to the healthy dynamic.
At one point I was questioning my use of all the behavioral science.
Our PM said, “Oh, this IS the differentiator. Keep going!”
The Oh no
Slow is smooth, right? Well...
About four months in, I started hearing things like, “we need to get moving or we’ll run out of time.”
I thought, we have a whole year to ship — how is that not enough time?
What I didn’t know was that the ticking clock was not set to the launch, it was set to the internal appetite for risk — and further investment.
We started to do some of the modeling for what we believed it would take to acquire customers seven months into our work.
Why seven months? Well, the person who would help us out was swamped.
It’s a mistake I’ll not be making myself, ever again.
Acquisition costs for 100 customers in the first year of operating would be around $100 per customer.
I was like yeah — that sounds about right, between print and digital and the trial we were thinking about.
But Morningstar was used to spending $0. They ran internal ads and had reciprocal deals with financial advice magazines.
They canceled us, 9 months in.
The Aha
This is a weird moment to have an Aha. I know.
But we take our lessons when we need them.
Three things created an aha! when it seemed like all sad trombone.
First up: never, ever let the rock star/dream team thing happen or stick. Enthusiasm is one thing, but pedestals are bad. When our project was canceled I was moved into ‘regular’ design world and I had to overcome a lot of the weirdness created by that.
Second: Designers must invest in understanding the business. I already knew this, and at Morningstar, I saw the consequence of avoiding it. The difference between my ability to negotiate for design and the designers who didn’t know the subject matter or how business worked generally was stark.
But to my first point, it isn’t enough that I know things. I had to find ways to share my knowledge without being patronizing or pedantic. That one was very YMMV. Some designers could not accept that I knew things they did not.
Third: Storytelling preserved a lot of our ideas for future use. I made a point of presenting our work as we went, which created buy in for some of our more interesting onboarding ideas. Those ideas made it into other products.
One more thing: Shipping is important, and I wish we had, but there was other success, too.
The Results
Key ideas for financial goals and education that I came up with, based on behavioral economic theory, made their way into several products.
I gained full service design experience by participating in everything from business modeling to back end architecture to design system use on a mobile device.
I learned how to play a key role in building and sustaining a healthy, psychologically safe, productive agile team.