Fidelity Investments: A case study for loss associate desktop experience

Role: Lead UX Designer

Timeline: January 2023 - Present

Project: North star vision for how to streamline the loss experience for Associates

What I did: Research, define user journey, collab with other teams, sketching, prototyping, talk with users

Tools: Figma/iPad

What I’ve Learned

  1. Aligning with beneficiary hub, personal investing associates desktop and workplace investing associates desktop teams is challenging.

  2. Our technology stack is far away from being able to do all the things we want it to do in a timely manner.

  3. There are a lot of possible integrations, but we need to figure out if we can use them for BOTH personal and workplace use cases.

Design Process

Problem

Fidelity Loss Associates have a very complicated and complex end-to-end experience when process new deaths, determining beneficiaries, opening accounts and moving money. The existing process lacks organization, clarity and guidance and hinders their ability to effectively manage tasks and cases accurately and in a timely manner.

How might we

How might we create a uniformed personal and workplace investing experience for loss associates that is just as good as our customers experience?

Understand

Getting up-to-speed

I came into this project 6 months after it had been kicked off. This required me to understand what had already been done and play some catch-up. I read through numerous PowerPoints, took my own notes, joined a Design Sprint, talked with Associates and reviewed roadmaps, personas, and user journeys.

Personas

There are 3 Fidelity Associate Personas. For this use case, the middle office associate is our focus.

Define

User Journey

After understanding the wealth of information and research that had already been done, I then went on to create a simple user journey to showcase the different tools needed for each phase and to show how the participants experience intermingles with the associate’s experience.

Design

Sketching

Once I felt I had a good level of knowledge, I began sketching out a “see-do” diagram to better understand what actions and read-only data needed to be on each page. Then, I started to wireframe and sketch out some early ideas.

Wireframes

Once I understood the information and actions needed, I started wireframing the hierarchy and page flows. I kept the team in the wireframing phase for a long time due to changing requirements and to get them to focus on the. key pieces of information versus more UI specific elements.

Hi-fi: Case Management

Before the associates starts taking calls for the day they need a place that can tell them what their day is like, meetings, open cases and weekly statistics.

Hi-fi: Dashboard

Once an associate receives a call from someone they will see this dashboard. They have the ability to see a status, start tasks, and keep track of money movement across all of the beneficiaries accounts.

Hi-fi: Transactions and integrations

Many of the transactions and tasks that the associate would use are experiences that, in some form, already exist within Fidelity. It was my responsibility to see how I could reskin them so it felt like one seamless end-to-end process.

Testing

Associate direct feedback

Due to this projects highly North Star nature, there was no formal usability testing. That being said, the wireframes and designs often were showcased to associates to get direct feedback on actions, data and integrations that might be needed. Many iterations were done based off of associate feedback.