Less Math-ing, More Advising for Financial Advisors
Why share this study?
I’m not a financial advisor (obviously), but I’ve always been fascinated by the world of finance. Early in my career, I was pretty indifferent to what was happening inside my 401(k). Is it a savings account? A mutual fund? Am I just burning 4% of my paycheck every month? Who knows!*
But eventually I realized that even a little investment knowledge can set you up for long term success. I decided to take charge of my accounts—and now, every year on my half-birthday, I go through the painful but necessary process of rebalancing my portfolio. In essence, transferring a percentage of one fund into another.
I know firsthand how valuable this task is, and I also understand how cumbersome some financial institutions make it. It’s for this reason, I was excited to streamline advisors' portfolio management with a new and improved transfer feature.
*Not me!
Competitive Analysis Wireframing Prototyping Usability Testing
The quick take (tldr version)
Company
Transamerica is a financial services company specializing in life insurance, investments, and retirement services. During my time there, I contributed to a major effort to modernize the platform financial advisors used to manage their portfolios. This involved rebuilding both the front-end and back-end experiences on an entirely new website.
I created this user flow for our dev team and as a visual checklist to ensure all interactions were covered
Project
I’m calling this section Project vs. Problem because, with any major software rebuild, the baseline goal is feature parity. For this initiative specifically, that meant bringing the fund transfer capabilities into the new Advisor Experience (AX). However, we also received anecdotal feedback from users that the legacy transfer process felt clunky and often times would resort to advisors calling Transamerica to make the necessary portfolio updates.
Solution
I redesigned the fund transfer feature with a streamlined user flow and crafted a sleek, intuitive UI that seamlessly aligned with the new AX brand. I then built a prototype to test with users and refine the experience.
Result
The good news was that after usability testing with our wholesale team (our next best audience for user testing since it’s ethically questionable for TA to pay advisors), we received very positive feedback—enough that I felt confident handing off the designs to development.
The bad news? Leadership was concerned about the technical scope creep of the new design, so I ultimately ended up doing more of a reskin of the existing experience.
The full length version
Studying the legacy experience
Jumping in, I used a brand-new BRD worksheet that our design team created to work with stakeholders on identifying goals and expectations. This proved to be a valuable conversation starter, allowing me to negotiate and explore alternative design options since the development handoff was still a few months away.
I then spent time auditing the legacy flow and quickly found an overly facile UI. Users could input the percentage of funds to transfer, but the corresponding monetary amount wasn’t displayed—making it difficult to understand, for example, how much from Fund A was actually being transferred into Fund X and Y.
Two of the legacy interactions with the transfer flow
Creative work-arounds
To gather more insight, I ran a scrappy competitive analysis by asking my fellow designers to send me screenshots of their banking transfer screens with sensitive information redacted. Thanks Photoshop! Once I collected a handful of examples, I used them as inspiration for whiteboarding.
When I felt I had a few well-developed concepts, I brought my dev lead over to discuss. Once I got the thumbs up from him, I then created the low-fidelity mockups below.
Visual design
After shopping my three concepts around with the design team, I chose one to develop in high fidelity. Working on the final visual polish moved relatively quickly because Transamerica, unlike any company I’ve worked for, had a robust and collaborative Design System team. Shoutout to Cardinal! They provided both a working Figma file, where you could "shop" for components, and a website detailing the dos and don’ts of usage—think Google Material Design.
Since most of the content was financial data, typography was doing most of the heavy lifting from a brand standpoint.
Some examples of foundational pieces in the Cardinal Design System
A sample of the final screens
Once my gorgeous prototype had her blowout, I tested the design with five members of our wholesale team, since recruiting advisors wasn’t an option. These team members interact with advisors all day, serving as their direct line of contact with Transamerica. In many cases, advisors struggled to navigate the transfer functionality and simply opted to call instead—giving wholesalers valuable insight into advisors' needs.
After a round of usability testing with the five wholesalers, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I took that as my cue to move the design into development.
This video shows a similar flow of what the wholesalers looked at for testing
Reflection point
One thing I’ve learned about in-person usability testing is that people often soften their feedback, even when reminded they won’t hurt my feelings. It’s possible my testing group wasn’t completely candid, especially since prototypes have limited functionality. Plus, with financial tools, it’s hard to gauge effectiveness without entering real data. If I had a time machine, I would have asked a front-end dev to build a dummy prototype with real calculations, allowing users to better understand whether the new design truly worked.
Unfortunately the design got pushed to a "V2" concept, which we all know what that means. By the time development was ready to pick up the work the PO was worried about the additional functionality adding scope. So the team ended up building out a reskinned version I did based on the existing experience. Shortly after this project concluded I left the company but hopefully the designs are enjoying their time in UX heaven.