Simplifying goal progress for individuals

Overview

Clients of advisors need a way to see their goals and their status. These dashboards would be available only through a client portal and utilizing data from another goals-based investing tool. This project showed an interactive report for clients and would help them understand their progress when discussing their plans with their advisor. 

My role

Researcher 🤔 / Designer ✍️

Challenges

The investing tool utilized by advisors was created with their subject matter expertise in mind; in other words, it was difficult for clients to fully grasp their goal’s status from a PDF report. Using data from this report, I created a capability in the client portal to display all goals in one view and explain the status in user-friendly terms. Another departure from the PDF report was distilling the goal plan status down to two terms, “on track” or “needs attention”. User testing showed that only displaying relevant information was preferable and providing context was vital to explaining if the client needed to make changes to reach their goal as outlined. 

Process

Starting with the existing PDF report and auditing other internal products, I put together some explorations of dashboards and progress towards a goal. I worked with a content strategist to develop a different set of language to explain the plan’s status to clients, and we prepared an A/B test to compare versions of this dashboard. After we reviewed responses, we merged the two versions into a goal progress dashboard experience that explained a client’s goals and options available to them to keep them on track with their goals or prompt them to discuss other changes with their advisor.

Outcomes

The last iteration of this experience was tested with overall positive responses that helped explain a goal’s path to success in terms clients would understand. Users still struggled with certain icons used by the parent application to signal a goal’s status, so additional context is needed for individuals. There is also an opportunity to integrate other features of the client portal experience into monitoring a goal’s progress, with many test participants expressing interest in seeing a holistic financial picture. 

Alpha prototype screens