This case study details how I led another UX Designer, whom I also manage, in a revamp of a financial adviser tool - Singlife onlien (SOL). Collaboratively, we tackled both research and design roles to transform this legacy platform for financial advisers.
Role
UX/UI Lead
Work
UX, UI, Research
Team
2 UX Designers
Outcomes
Reduced UI interaction costs by at least 30%, resulting in faster and easier completion of Advisers' goals.
Drastically cut down calls to support centers, saving costs for the business.
Digitized numerous manual policy management tasks, enabling quick and automated processing with instant results.
Enhanced usability and satisfaction for Advisers, as evident from SUS scores, surveys, and feedback.
What is this platform?
SOL or Singlife Online is a platform for Singlife Financial Advisers to manage all their Singlife client's policies. On this platform, they can retrieve clients personal information, generate policies documents like benefit illustrations, get most updated surrender values and investment funds, make changes to their client policies like updating of personal information, payment methods and more.
SOL has a monthly active user base of approximately 4000 individuals, comprising both Independent and Singlife Financial Advisers.
Problems faced by financial advisers and business
Advisers needs unmet
Our advisers face significant frustrations and restrictions while trying to find essential information or carry out time-sensitive actions related to client policies. These challenges stem from platform limitations and difficulties, occasionally resulting in goals and needs unmet.
Prohibiting Productivity
The platform's information and visual structure are severely lacking, with crucial content buried deep within and disorganized placement. Even straightforward tasks demand needlessly intricate interactions to be accomplished.
The platform is also riddled with bugs which are highly consequential. This has affected our Advisers productivity to the point where more times than we care to admit, the platform fails when they are physically with a client.
Higher Business Expenses
The lack of information being available on the platform resulted in Advisers needing to call our customer support centre to retrieve information, thus incurring a significant amount of cost yearly.
Design x business goals
Business goals
The business wants a redesign of the platform with improved UX and product offerings. Some of the key KPIs:
Address the problems, needs and objectives of Financial Advisers.
Reduce the need to call customer support centre thereby reducing costs.
Improve workflow and processes by digitizing and through automation.
Design goals
We strive to enhance the overall experience by tackling 4 key areas: Features, Design, Flow, Content.
Product Features must first and foremost address ALL Financial Adviser goals and needs, so they can accomplish all their daily tasks and responsibilities within this platform.
Design a modern and aesthetically pleasing interface while adhering to our design system and language.
Seamless Flow with simplified, automated processes, quick access to vital information, and context-based helpful prompts.
Content like information or visuals organized with structured layouts and hierarchies, providing a consistent rhythm, predictability, and ease of scanning.
Who says financial platforms have to be boring? Financial Advisers are people too and the tools they use could honestly do with much more love. Our mission is to build an exceptional and visually appealing platform that's also delightful to use.
Design strategy
Discovery & analysis
Understanding where we're at first is key. To begin, I delved deeply into the assessment of our existing platform and also examined some of our competitors, with a specific focus on usability, key features, design, and other relevant aspects.
I then created and executed a research plan, using the following methods to learn the following:
(i) User Interviews to unearth insights into the pain points, procedures, mental frameworks, goals and motivations of Financial Advisers.
(ii) Usability Testing to assess the effectiveness and pertinence of our design and concept.
Concept shaping
At the same time, we quickly developed design concepts directly from our deep understanding of Financial Advisers' needs and preferences. We took this chance to challenge existing design norms, pushing the boundaries of UI visual design to ensure our solutions would scale and stay relevant for years to come.
Influencing up, down and across
We gathered extensive data from 14 Financial Advisers and synthesized it using affinity mapping. From this, we developed personas and customer journey maps that we shared with relevant working groups and management. This directly informed and significantly contributed to management discussions and feature prioritization.
The outcomes we achieved
Overall interaction cost on platform reduced by at least 30%.
Comparing with legacy platform, the number of fields, pages and interactions have significantly reduced and streamlined. Advisers can now complete their goals and tasks much faster with less interactions.
Support centers call enquiries reduced significantly.
Independent and Singlife Financial Advisers can now access and retain all information about Singlife customers, removing the need to call customer service support thus reducing cost.
Straight-through processing with instant results.
This means that Advisers no longer need to email in to initiate policy management services, resulting in a singificantly faster processing time and even faster turn around for Advisers.
Improved efficiency and satisfaction.
Significantly increased satisfaction levels based on our feedback mechanisms in place - Regular direct feedback sessions, surveys and SUS.