Accessible Investing
There is almost no subject more thought about and less discussed than money.
Investing is part of that. Everyone who is not independently wealthy has to invest if they ever hope to stop working. But no one is born knowing how to structure their 401k.
It’s not the easiest thing to learn about, either. People avoid it because of its complexity and because if you read the news the industry surrounding investing looks like the territory of professional grifters.
AND it’s not okay to admit you don’t understand how it works.
The result: millions of people inhabit a combined state of ignorance and unpreparedness.
What a terrible Catch 22.
As a designer who once co-founded a wealth management firm, I was well familiar with the moving parts of financial advice. I was hired as the design lead in a large squad that included back and front end developers, a QA expert, a visual designer, a researcher, a content strategist, a behavioral economist, and a product manager so well-informed he built his own portfolios. It was the most fully staffed team the product org had, as far as I could see.
What I did
Task One: Learn the Problem Space
My earliest collaborators were a lead researcher and a behavioral economist. Together, we looked at models we could use and how to translate them into a combination of education and digital product, we thought about what kind of support a service like this might need from real people, we went into homes to talk to people, and then we talked to more people.
Task Two: Start Designing
When it was time to add some pixels to the mix, we chose a few psychology theories and Morningstar methodologies to design an onboarding flow that was mobile first. We talked to more people, testing the heck out of it until we got to a Tinder-like flow for choosing financial goals and a highly approachable conversational onboarding flow we found resonated best.
I also tried two things I had never done before.
We fully folded developers and product — the entire team — into our research analysis. Everyone listened to the results of every test and we collaborated on the synthesis of those results.
Another thing I tried that I had never done before: as we approached the actual build in large stages, we would review what we were building and why with the entire team. This was not sprint planning or backlog grooming.
For every major piece of the service I would put together a high level flow, present it, and the team would discuss that flow so we could make decisions about what we would do. The goal was that by the end of our conversation we had a shared understanding of what we were building, why, and what it connected to in the larger service.
No surprises, no skepticism, no pushback in moments the team needed everyone’s cooperation. It worked beautifully.
Task Three: Use IP & technology
We also had to think about where people would be putting their money, which really meant what we were going to do with Morningstar IP and technology. We chose our goals-based model portfolio creation tool, talked to the team that owned it, and started integrating that into the product. That was pretty hard, from a design perspective, to do on a phone. We thought most people would probably move to a larger screen for that part but still designed for a small one.
We also had to figure out how transactions would run once people opened an account. We chose a custodian and set it up to run through Morningstar’s existing registered investment advisory (RIA). Custodians handle actual trades, deposits or withdrawals when people invest in a new portfolio or it needs to be rebalanced. We started integrating their tech with ours.
Task Four: Pull it all together for an MVP
Just as it was all coming together, when we were ready to pull all of that together to execute on an MVP, the company pulled the plug.
It was the cost of customer acquisition. Morningstar is used to spending $0 on this because every other product is aimed at its current market. A new market where people didn’t know what Morningstar even was would take money and new marketing to access.
BUT I will say this — of all the things I’ve worked on that didn’t launch, most of our major ideas and research were used and propagated throughout other products.
I also spent a lot of time informally mentoring in that role in topics of career and in learning “the business” of Morningstar. My impact as a designer wasn’t seen as much as it was felt.
A handful of slides are below — the first early prototyping work that moved into the onboarding flow of the second slide, and an early prototype of goal presentation. More available on further conversation.
