Financial Engines

Financial Engines is in the tricky business of helping simple folks make complex decisions about retirement investments.

THE CHALLENGE

Financial Engines helps people invest their retirement money. They work both as the sole manager of investor accounts and by providing online tools that help people make their own investment decisions. The customer lifecycle – from enrollment to portfolio management to retirement – represents a delicate and trusting relationship. Further, the financial crash of 2008 resulted in tremendous distrust of the financial industry. Financial Engines decided it was time to redefine its customer experience.

Most of this work focused on helping investors understand how current behavior impacts future gains.

THE SOLUTION

Above all, the experience needed to be friendly, straight-forward and transparent. The design tenets followed from simple information presentation – how big is my portfolio, how much am I saving, how much will I have when I retire – and an understanding of how those numbers compared with individual goals. We also focused on giving customers control of their experience through interactive graphs and tools that allowed exploration of different retirement scenarios. Over the course of a couple years, we rolled out a new corporate website, an enrollment website and several product specific sites.

Interactive calculators help users experiment with different savings/investment strategies.

ROLE

UX Strategy, Lead IA @ HYDRANT

ACTIVITIES & DELIVERABLES

Market Research, Requirements, Process Flows, Wireframes, Information Design