Fee Disclosures
How I collaborated with business and technology to simplify an internal tool in a 2-week sprint
SNAPSHOT
Spring 2018: 2 weeks
Business Partner: VALIC, AIG’s provider of Defined Contribution group retirement plans (401(k)s and 403(b)s)
Product: SponsorFIT, the online portal for B2B users to administer group retirement plans. We redesigned the entire portal in 2017 after reports that VALIC was loosing clients due to their legacy experience.
Feature: Create Fee Disclosure Packages, used by internal users to generate and share legally-required Fee Disclosure documents in combination with appropriate cover letters and / or email campaigns. I completed the UX work for this feature in a 2-week sprint.
My Role: UX Research and Design, at times overseeing two additional UX Designers during the approximate 10 month redesign.
Outcome: By working closely with users and CapGemini, our development vendor, I was able to make significant improvements to this feature despite the constraints around existing business logic.
THE REQUIREMENTS
Written broadly by our development vendor CapGemini for scoping purposes, the original requirements for this feature captured the main actions a user could take on the page, but provided little insight into how and why this feature was used, and suggested that all combinations of fee disclosure documents, email campaigns, and cover letters were possible.
THE LEGACY EXPERIENCE
I logged into my test account to learn more about the feature and to do a basic heuristic analysis.
The legacy interface, while a seemingly simple, one-page experience, turned out to be anything but. It allowed for multiple selections at once, but also allowed users to select combinations that resulted in error messages when the user attempted to submit their selections. Although used by a relatively small internal team, this was an opportunity to showcase the power of design to improve experiences for all users.
LEARNING MORE
I reached out to the lead of the Fee Disclosures team to learn how this feature is really used. She talked me through the use cases, showed me how she uses the feature, and shared a 29 page instruction and reference document that included a table of the allowed combinations of documents, cover letters, and email campaigns. I quickly shared these findings with CapGemini, as their technical team was examining the legacy code in order to more completely understand the business logic of this feature.
VISUALIZING THE FLOW
To facilitate collaboration and create a shared understanding between myself, our business partners, internal SME, and CapGemini, I created an interactive user flow in Axure. Initially used to illustrate the different combinations possible, I added wireframes of each screen, accessible on click, so that our development partners could easily understand the inventory and flow of screens in the suggested design. This allowed CapGemini to more easily assign pieces of the work to different members of their off-shore team who were each developing parts of this feature.
Part of the interactive user flow I created to facilitate collaboration and communication between business, development, and UX.
The above user flow diagram, however, was not very useful in convincing our SME that this new flow would be an improvement over the existing interface. In fact, for our SME, this diagram was overly complex and she was concerned that her team would be unhappy moving from a one-page experience to one with multiple screens.
A CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE TO COMMUNICATE THE FEEL OF THE NEW EXPERIENCE
The new experience needed to feel like an improvement for the internal team who regularly uses this feature, so I created a low-fidelity prototype in Axure that allowed them to explore how they could use the new design to create the variety of packages they needed.
This clip shows a few of the ways users can create Fee Disclosure packages using the prototype I created. You can explore the prototype yourself here.
While the prototype may seem overwhelming to users not familiar with creating Fee Disclosure packages, our internal team found this new design fast, easy to use, and they appreciated that it removed the possibility of choosing invalid combinations. I shared this feedback with our Product Owner, who was comfortable approving the new approach with the sign-off from the internal users.
GREAT SOLUTIONS TAKE IT TO THE NEXT STEP
The sprint requirements for this feature only included functionality related to creating packages and selecting the appropriate Group(s) and Plan(s) to share it with. However, in my discussions with the Fee Disclosure team lead, I knew it was important to ask about the steps before and after packages are created.
Our earlier work during the site redesign had flattened the IA, making it easier for the Fee Disclosure team to access this feature when needed. But, there still was an opportunity to further improve the experience by making it easy for users to take the next step required in their workflow.
The most common action taken after a package is created is navigate to Fee Disclosure Maintenance section of the site (which required multiple clicks in the legacy experience), apply three filters in order to find the recently created package, check that it was created properly, and mark it available to external users. While this manual QA step was valuable to our users, the number of steps to get there was not. I included a primary CTA on the confirmation page to allow users to go directly to the Fee Disclosure Maintenance section, and worked with CapGemini developers to ensure that the three filters were applied automatically, taking users directly to the packages they needed to review and post.
RESULTS
A small feature in a larger product, metrics around the impact of this specific feature are not available. However, qualitatively, the internal users of this feature were quite happy with the redesign, and more broadly, this improvement contributed to a shift in VALIC’s overall approach to product design.
Prior to focusing on SponsorFIT, the administrative site where this feature lives, VALIC redesigned their participant-facing site with an external vendor who designed and implemented prescriptive requirements from business SMEs, resulting in a site that was difficult to use and unpopular with participants. As an internal partner, our NYC-based Experience Design team worked WITH our business partners to understand the problems we were solving and applied user-centered design in order to reach the best solutions given the time and technology constraints.
Today, VALIC has completely shifted from a “project” approach to a “product” approach. They hired three Product Designers to work locally at their Houston headquarters to continue to improve their products, taking all design work in-house, and the SponsorFIT team holds quarterly Design Sprints that often influence the next quarter’s PI planning.
RECOGNITION
After the new site launched, Corporate Insight published this article about the improved experience that resulted from the new design. Internally, there was much excitement throughout AIG when the new site launched, and I was one of three employees across the entire AIG organization to receive a Star Award in 2017, recognizing high-performing individuals, from Michael Lewis, CDO, which included not only recognition but also a monetary award.