NewRetirement: Marathon
Role
Designer
(Individual Project)
Timeline
4-5 weeks
Skills and Tools
User Interviews, A/B Testing, UX, Product Design, Content Design, Prototyping, Figma
Marathon is an extension of the NewRetirement onboarding process and dashboard, creating a structure to saving through goal setting while building knowledge and confidence through providing an approachable starting point to financial planning.
The Brief
NewRetirement recognizes how financial planning can get complicated and provides educational resources, coaching, and organization tools
to ease the burden of saving for retirement.
Looking to grow its services and audience, NewRetirement wants to identify any shortcomings and rework its product to fit a wider pool of users, hopeful to now retain those who slip through the cracks.
My Solution
With NewRetirement's mission of helping users become confident to make the most of their money and time, I focused on enhancing their onboarding process and dashboard.
The Marathon planning tool allows NewRetirement to use data surrounding a user's goals and interests to shape their entire NewRetirement experience.
Saving Is Like Running A Marathon
The Marathon tool introduces milestones and tangible goals to the NewRetirement dashboard, helping users focus on what they can do financially in the present while building up stamina for the big finish (retirement).
Your Race is Your Own
The two additional steps at the beginning of the NewRetirement onboarding process were designed to give the user more control at the start of their financial planning journey.
By collecting data about each user's lifestyle, goals, and interests, building out the remainder of one's profile with Marathon feels familiar as the onboarding process adapts to their responses.
NewRetirement Adapts To You
Marathon adjusts NewRetirement's dashboard view and navigation using information from your goals, lifestyle, and needs.
Actionable items are populated within the 'To-Dos' section with the capability to define and organize future goals by decade.
Client Pitch and Feedback
The pitch I made to the NewRetirement CEO focused on how their users' goals and interests could be understood to shape the experience they have inside the product, showcasing the more direct onboarding process and fresh take on their planning dashboard seen above.
This was something we've talked about before and it was great to see it realized and mocked up. The design fits right in with our product and the kinds of content and coaching roles we offer, including the guidance we would give our users based on this—which we haven’t done yet.
- Stephen Chen, NewRetirement CEO
Identifying The Expanded Audience
At the onset of the project, I spoke with stakeholders and experts like NewRetirement's CEO Stephen Chen, a Certified Public Accountant, and an entrepreneur who follows the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) lifestyle in addition to surveying 28 Gen Z and Younger Millennials.
Through our conversations, I saw a need for younger adults to have the tools to understand their financial situation and be confident in making decisions regarding the bigger picture. Based on the survey results alone I determined that pivoting the focus of saving away from retirement and towards overall accumulation would serve the interests of the expanded audience well.
NewRetirment Pitfalls
All of NewRetirement's features have relevance to one another across the Insights and My Plan libraries, but their abundance creates a major informational gap between the user's current age and financial situation and their retirement.
Learning From The Competition
The NewRetirement website would benefit from narrowing the scope of its features through an incremental approach to data visualization and information output similar to its competitors.
Vanguard, TurboTax, and Mint utilize weekly and/or monthly breakdowns of time in addition to visualizing progress within the whole. They also organize multiple forms of relevant information on the same screen by separating them into tabs, reducing the amount of pathways the user takes in their product.
Coming Up With Potential Features
Using the disruptive thinking method, I produced three new features, Levioso, Marathon, and Forecast. Each utilizes NewRetirement's pre-existing tools and information while addressing gaps in financial knowledge to effectively target the needs of the expanded audience.
Concept Testing
Due to the amount of control and adaptability Levioso and Marathon would provide, I conducted a series of user interviews to narrow down which feature has most beneficial impact in educating and retaining customers.
The features were rated on a scale of 1-5 by interviewees, highlighting key strengths and weaknesses.
Marathon is the Standout
Marathon is ideal because it's more approachable than Levioso.
The feature easily accommodates users who have little to no financial knowledge as it outlines what steps they should take to achieve their goals, even if they're starting with no savings.
Building and Integrating Marathon
I was able to make Marathon a reality utilizing NewRetirement's design system and Figma libraries. Focusing on their onboarding screens and main dashboard, I reworked verbiage and adjusted the layout and user flow as needed to blend Marathon seamlessly with the product.
Dashboard Before
Dashboard After
Onbaording Step 2 Before
Onboarding Step 2 After
Takeaways
Working on a client project of this caliber enabled me to explore more in-depth insights and product optimization as I involved both the stakeholders and end users in the design process.
This hands-on approach allowed the product to naturally evolve without a major overhaul, with the feedback received becoming an invaluable asset to meet the needs of Gen Z and Young Millenials at a crossroads with their financial futures.
Next Steps
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Integrate Marathon across the entire consumer product space by adjusting the content and layout of all Plan, Coach, and Insight sub-pages.
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Run additional usability tests across NewRetirement's entire audience to ensure Marathon's variability.
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Explore future expansion of services (as a mobile application) backed by user research and consumer interest.