Reimagining the Wealth Advisor Experience

Role & Team

Team: Lead Experience Designer/Strategist, Junior Designer/Strategist
Role: Experience Designer/Strategist
Project Duration: 12 weeks
Tools & Methodologies: Contextual inquiry, co-creation, research insights & experience principles, experience map, directional wireframes

Challenge

Wealth Advisors had to navigate clunky systems and dated processes to serve their clients. As a result, advisors were inefficiently performing tasks, not capturing important info in central places, not able to best utilize specialty advisors and other coworkers in larger processes, and overall leading to a fractured view of a client’s finances that impacts customer perception.

Our goal was to streamline systems to provide advisors with seamless access to client information, reducing redundancies, and enabling effective team collaboration. As our stakeholders implemented a third-party software, they wanted to know how they could empower advisors to enable a more ideal client experience given the new tool—while laying groundwork for a future state experience.

Research Approach

We employed a mixed-methods research approach, including:

Stakeholder Workshops

We hosted a session with technology stakeholders across 11 products to assess current capabilities, pain points, and system interdependencies. These workshops included hands-on activities that helped establish data flow directions and identify opportunities for system consolidation.

Contextual Inquiry

Our team shadowed 14 wealth advisors across three geographic markets to observe their daily workflows, motivations, and system usage. This approach enabled us to uncover inefficiencies, identify workarounds, and better understand the nuanced needs of different advisor roles.

Synthesis & Modeling

We synthesized our research into three models to illustrate advisor relationships and workflows—

  • Sequence Model: Visualized inconsistencies in how advisors performed similar tasks, such as preparing for client meetings. Across all 14 interviewees, we found that no two advisors performed the same sequence of tasks to accomplish the same larger task. For instance, the seemingly simple action of preparing ahead of a client meeting saw alarming discrepancies of systems accessed, tools used, and process lengths—and a lot of advisor frustration.

  • Identity Model: Identified core advisor archetypes based on their motivations and client engagement styles. Though wealth advisors serve one of five roles on a larger advisor team, we found common ground when it came to what drove advisors in their client work, though they differed in what they were hoping to accomplish and how they wanted to be perceived as a wealth advisor.

  • Collaboration Model: Mapped how advisors interacted within their teams, distinguishing between "on-stage" (client-facing) and "behind-the-scenes" (internal) collaboration and dynamics.

Co-Creation

With a firmer grasp of the advisor’s ecosystem of systems, we co-designed storyboards alongside advisors to test initial concepts. Working alongside advisors helped us to craft the vision of the ideal wealth management experience for their needs as both a cohesive team and as an individual, specialized advisor. 

Key Insights & Deliverables

Our research culminated in:

  • Models & Experience Map: The models representing various advisor archetypes, group dynamics, and workflows helped aggregate key insights for the product team in an actionable way without needing to read the entire research notes. The experience map provided a holistic view of the advisor journey, emphasizing critical pain points and moments of opportunity.

  • Experience Principles & Insights: These artifacts served as a north star for the project team, ensuring that all decisions—from product strategy to development—remained human-centered. While the primary intent was to inform the digital product design, we found that many of the research findings could be applied to the design of the advisor-client interactions overall, as well as inform team structure and advisor development.

  • Directional Wireframes: We developed medium-fidelity wireframes that illustrated how a unified advisor experience could look, with detailed annotations explaining design decisions. These wireframes provided guidance for the development team on ways to integrate, connect, and prioritize features aligned with our research insights as they brought the platform further into the design and build stages.

Reflection

This project reinforced the importance of human-centered research in shaping digital experiences—even those that were envisioned as third-party builds. Our research created a foundation of wealth advisor research insights that could be drawn upon as the company continued to evolve the advisor ecosystem—both digital and non-digital experiences and interactions. We were able to give voice to research insights in a way that could be readily used by the implementation team, without having to spend hours understanding a complex trove of notes.