0→1 Design of challenger's investor/advisor portals
Role
UX Lead
Duration
6 Months
Client
Status
Shipped
📌Executive Summary
Challenger's entire annuity purchase lifecycle was completely locked in paper processes, causing severe operational inefficiencies and extended processing friction.
I stepped into a highly ambiguous, multi-stakeholder corporate environment, to lead the design of their new investor & advisor portals.
By defining a rigorous design feedback loop with legal, branding and leadership teams and digitizing the entire buying and maintenance journey, I reduced the core annuity purchase journey from an average of seven days to under three days.
16 end-to-end processes converted from paper based to a digital portal
Overall Impact
Reduced average time from contact to purchase completion of annuity from over 1 week to under 3 days due to digitization
👀Overview
Introduction
Even in 2023, Challenger’s (Australia’s largest annuity firm) annuity purchase processes were entirely paper based. This meant long wait times before purchases were completed, physical collaboration requirements with financial advisors and inefficiency.
My team was brought in to digitize their processes and design new investor and advisor portals.
Collaboration
Internal team
Product Manager
Engineering
DevOps
Client teams
Branding
Legal
Marketing
Design
Design manager
UX Lead (Me)
4 junior designers
Important Context & Constraints
Challenger sells annuities
Annuities are long-term contracts with an insurance company designed for retirement income.
Advisors help purchase and manage investments
Investors can ask for internal or external financial advisors for help with any processes for purchasing and managing their investments.
The end users are over the age of 60
People over the age of 60, usually have low digital confidence and require guidance and simplified explanations.
The platform needed to be accessible
Finance is highly regulated and must adhere to accessibility guidelines under Disability Discrimination Act (DDA, 1992).
🔍 Design Process
This was a 0-1 design project that required validation and go ahead from branding, users, legal and marketing teams and C-suite, so I followed a multi step approach to the design.
Conducted discovery workshops
I conducted workshops and whiteboarding sessions with internal stakeholders to understand business needs and map out investor and advisor user flows
Messy brainstorming to extract real business and user needs from ambiguous requirements
Mapped user flows
I collaborated with the product manager to map out complex user journeys and business requirements using Visio and Excel (NDA material)
Building out user flows based on finalized business requirements
Created early wireframes
Since each flow required validation from different teams like engineering, legal, marketing and branding, I validated designs early to reduce rework at high fidelity stages.
This was specially important for validation of the legal disclaimers and language used in the interface.
Wireframes presented to teams to validate legal, eng constraints and stakeholder validation
🎨 Design system
To ensure the platform can scale over time, ensure design consistency and reduce design and development efforts, I created a robust design system keeping the company branding and WCAG principles at the forefront of it.
Atomic design system built from the ground up with accessibility and brand in mind
💻 Deliverables
After 6 months of fast paced work, the team delivered
16
End to end processes
18
Digitized purchase forms
200+
Prototyped screens
Jobs to be done based dashboard
Easy entry points for all high priority tasks
Keyboard accessible
Low cognitive load
Easy advisor access
Uses AFS license against ASIC database to allow licensed financial advisors to use platform
Removes verification friction for advisors to increase adoption
Role based access management
Enables financial firms to delegate access with appropriate permissions
Enables B2B collaboration for Challenger
Mobile Access
Translated most desktop functionality to mobile to enable easier access for financial advisors as well as investors on the go
🔮Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned
Ensuring legal compliance
Since finance is highly regulated, I had to ensure that all copy and language used was run through the legal team for validation
Accessbility compliance
Australia Disability Act, 1992 regulates Fintech products and requires equal access to users, which had to be considered designing from the ground up
Designing for a 60+ age audience
Annuities are only for people over the age of 60, so the product had to be extremely simple and intuitive for people with low tech and financial literacy
Successful leadership meetings with presentations of our work
Design needs space to breathe.
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