Vanguard - Case Study

The Ask

Provide a world-class experience and increase online engagement for individual investors through Vanguard’s Personal Advisor Services (PAS).

Project Overview

My Contributions

Vanguard differentiates its PAS services by providing interactions with a real advisor at a low cost. However, PAS was reaching scale limitations, with the main constraint as advisor's time. Customers increasingly expect a more interactive experience to adapt to their circumstances.

Vanguard was looking for a future vision for the PAS experience that answers the question: How can incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and digitizing more of PAS client interactions enhance the customer experience, while enhancing the value of the PAS relationship for customers?

Led the design team across all phases from discovery to delivery.

Deliverables and Tasks: Competitive analysis, ideation, workshop presentations, visual design, presentation creation, client presentations

How We Got There

Below is an overview of the process used to create the digital user experience for the Vanguard PAS project. It starts with establishing empathy with the users. Once we have an understanding of who the user is, we go deeper into learning about the unique experiences that they go through and how it shapes their needs. This is analyzed, broken into various flows that establish a clear path for the right solution. Finally, multiple designs emerge that are based on an understanding of the needs of the user.

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Design

➊ Empathize

User Workshops

User workshop output

Intensive user workshops were conducted over seven days which included nineteen remote user interviews with more than fifteen Vanguard advisors taking part in the exercises. These workshops took an overarching look at service offerings of the company and helped to uncover dozens of areas for Vanguard to explore for future growth. This helped create a better understanding of the needs of the users and set the foundation for our vision exploration.

After synthesizing the hundreds of responses received from customers, prospects and members of the Vanguard team, the insight that best encapsulated the overarching issue that kept users up at night was the following:

How will unexpected life events impact my goals?

Key Insight

➋ Define

Landscape Analysis

Once we had a better understanding of the users, we turned to learning about the competitive playing field. We started this process by doing a deep-dive into looking at competitors across a broad spectrum. This includes, direct and indirect competitors, companies that were disruptors in the industry and the well established beacons within the investment world. Additionally, we looked at numerous out-of-category companies in order to establish a more diverse set of influences.

Experience Territories

As we reviewed the competitive / comparative set of websites, we looked for innovative, unique and effective approaches to acquiring new customers, re-engaging with existing customers and deepening relationships with loyal customers. This exercise was conducted with the goal of uncovering ideas that could offer sustainable value for 3-5 years. We looked at dozens of sites and pulled out fifty-two examples that would be used in our workshop. The examples were broken into three main categories based on insight from the first user workshop (Acquisition, Reengagement and Deepening Relationships.) We then further organized the ideas into sub-groups. Screen shots of these various concepts were laid out in a Miro board and paired with notes pulled from previous workshops.

The ideas were presented in a workshop that consisted of 21 participants from the client and agency who were all given dots and stickies to identify the ideas that resonated with them.
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These dots were color coded to represent three classifications:
Relevancy - how much does the experience matter to our target audience
Differentiation - how will this experience help Vanguard to stand out among our competitors
Own-ability - how can Vanguard keep this experience unique to them and keep the competition out

The results of the dot voting exercise was synthesized and used to help inform the next phase of exploration – ideation.

➌ Ideate

Idea Generation

Time To Pick Favorites

With a clearer understanding of the types of concepts that resonated most with our client, we set out to create a number of ideas that would reimagine Vanguard’s online experience. Ideas were sketched, scribbled, white-boarded and captured as inspiration struck.

The ideas were given a bit more polish and turned into wireframes for our final workshop/voting session. The ideas were grouped into the categories of Intuitive Guidance, Enhanced Advisor Check-in and Real Time Collaboration. The final selections would have visual design applied and be prepared for a presentation to the steering committee.

➍ Design

Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of sources. For Vanguard, that unlikely source was Marvel's Cinematic Universe (MCU).

During a design meeting, the team was chatting about the blur of shows we had been binge watching in the evenings. Among those shows was Loki - a Marvel series about a cunning trickster from Norse mythology who was violating the rules of time by jumping across timelines of the multiverse. With each jump, his chaos would generate a new timeline.

It was this concept that triggered the idea of allowing investors to explore what would happen if they could play out the impact of an unexpected event in their financial timeline.

MCU Inspiration

Sometimes... 
chaos plays its hand

Multiverse of money management - Despite our best efforts to plan our financial future, unexpected events do occur. Those events could be negative, such as the loss of a loved one or positive like a child deciding to go to med-school. In these and the countless unexpected events of life, there is often a financial impact. And so, what if we could drag and drop those events into our future timeline - what would the impact be? What would the timelines in our financial multiverse consist of if we each could channel our inner Loki? Utilizing artificial intelligence driven solutions we are able to create a personalized financial multiverse experience.
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This is the experience we set out to create to help Vanguard's customers sleep well at night.

The VanGuardians of the Galaxy will return...