Capital Group

Simplifying retirement plan reviews

Retirement plan reviews

Capital Group is a leading investment manager that focuses on delivering superior investment outcomes to its clients, including investors and financial professionals. A key aspect of a financial advisor is to optimize financial strategies, boost performance, and provide expert advisory support to investors and plan sponsors.
 
One critical duty of financial advisors is to conduct routine retirement plan reviews, where they serve as fiduciaries in ensuring that plan sponsors maintain optimal plan health. By conducting due diligence activities for retirement plans, financial advisors can detect any administrative errors or issues promptly, mitigate bigger problems in the future and provide sound advice to their clients.
 
As Design Lead at Capital Group, my primary responsibility entailed overseeing every aspect of the creative process. From the conceptualization of user-centered experiences to developing high-fidelity wireframes, I ensured that our design solutions met the business requirements and brand compliant while upholding a digital-first experience.

Goal

The objective is to assist financial advisors in prioritizing retirement plan reviews by providing them with the necessary tools, information, and support. Financial advisors are committed to making strategic choices, but they may not have the adequate resources to do so effectively. Retirement plan reviews may be seen as an unnecessary administrative hassle, causing financial professionals to lose focus on their key responsibilities. 

Insights

To help streamline the review process, financial advisors may depend on checklists to ensure that all necessary documentation is gathered. Our goal is to alleviate the burden on financial professionals by offering them the necessary resources to make strategic choices and achieve their objectives seamlessly.

Day to day activities of a financial advisor

Solution

In today's fast-paced world, financial advisors often face time constraints when it comes to conducting reviews. However, effective preparation can be achieved by following four simple steps

Fours easy steps to conduct effective reviews

1. Review plan's fund lineup 
2. Assess participant activity
3. Analyze plan fees and expenses
4. Prepare for the new year

Retirement plan reviews

Approach

• Discovery: Gather research from user feedback to gain insights.
• Design: Present solutions and iterate them based on feedback from stakeholders.
• Build: Create wireframes using a pre-built design system component.
• Deploy: Present completed digital assets and provide them to stakeholders.

Role

• Managed the entire design process by initially defining the user experience, then crafting high-fidelity digital assets using the existing company design system.
• Worked collaboratively in an agile framework with key stakeholders including subject-matter experts, writers, web authors, and delivery leads.  
• Focused on the user problem, presenting a user-centered solution in terms that all stakeholders could understand, and presenting them with insights, facts, and data.

Illustrating the user journey

Scope & Constraints

The successful completion of this project hinged heavily on maintaining open channels of communication with numerous stakeholders involved. I made it a top priority to keep everyone informed and updated on crucial details and progress milestones. This involved utilizing multiple tools and platforms, including the Jira Kanban board to diligently track project timelines and monitor forward momentum. Additionally, I regularly uploaded comprehensive reviews onto Workfront to ensure that all stakeholders had access to pertinent information and could provide timely feedback. To further streamline communication and ensure alignment across teams, I consistently shared project status updates during the daily standup meetings. By prioritizing communication and transparency throughout the project, we were able to deliver the desired outcomes on time and to the satisfaction of all involved parties.

• Timeline: 6 weeks (discover, design, build and deploy)
• Deliverables: UI, wireframes, and digital assets

Tools

• Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Sketch, Invision, Zeplin, Workfront, Jira

Retrospective

Knowing what I know now, there are several things I would have done differently. As a new member of the Capital Group team, I took on a project that the team believed would be simple. Unfortunately, it took numerous revisions to achieve an optimal user experience. In retrospect, the crucial factor for success was understanding Capital Group's design system components, which were still in the beta testing phase. I collaborateI with the writer and subject-matter expert to reduce the copy by 25%, a significant accomplishment

Another valuable aspect of my work on the project was gaining hands-on experience with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which allowed me to understand how components were created and integrated into a holistic design system, ultimately promoting more efficient design.
 
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned, however, was that accessibility is key. I am much more aware of the tools available to guide designers in accessibility practices, such as color contrast tools and adhering to WCAG 2.1 standards. Additionally, I discovered how to leverage tools like axe Dev Tools to assist web authors with accessibility testing.