Introducing banking products: how to make a match

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The CHALLENGE

The Bank of America checking product overview page had been wanting some TLC for a while now. The page was not accessible, and was cumbersome.

Key work done

I lead the design team that reimagined the page soup to nuts. Client insights drove what points we wanted to have shine, and what to make discoverable with on-page interactions.

THE OUTCOME

See for yourself at bac.com/deposits

  • An introduction to our offering in the ways clients are seeking to compare their choices.

  • A page that is more dynamic, more modular, and digital-forward.

  • A way to convey the necessary more approachably

Where we started:

  • Cumbersome interaction architecture - If you’re coming to this page with a product in mind, you have to click to open a modal, to then select which of the three products you’re opening. With very similar names, it can be hard to remember which one you’d wanted.

  • Sectioned design layout - Each section has a clear stated focus, but each felt like it was pulled in from a different web site, collaged together.

  • Hidden value propositions - The key points that would help a user make a decision between checking products was hidden on the page. Tools, brand commitment, and benefits we know clients are seeking got lost on the page.

How it’s going now

  • Scan to snag attention - Consumers told us they want the exact type of product information, bank benefit, or tool they want to learn more about before making a product decision to “jump out at them”

  • Explore at your own pace - progressive disclosure is meaningfully peppered throughout. It’s clear when something will open on the page, and when something will take you on to a different journey on our site

  • Illustrations and imagery to reinforce the key (sometimes dry, sometimes lengthy) points being made

 

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Reimagine opening a bank account

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The CHALLENGE

We designed a modular account opening flow that can flex for checking, savings, credit card and home equity loan applications. This involved mapping out business rule logic across all lines of business to introduce synergies where possible, and bringing a staggering array of business stakeholders, legal council, and tech partners along the ride to commit to designs and decisions.

Key work done

My role as lead was shepherding the project across 2 years, managing three to six designers and content strategists throughout the project lifecycles. As a player/coach I rolled up my sleeves and jumped into the information architecture, design decision frameworks, and visual exploration that pushed the envelope from a simple “lift and shift” to a true revision of an account opening flow.

THE OUTCOME

Outcome data is as of now strictly NDA’d but we are proud of the results and how we have improved the flow.

doing the work

Start with what’s there

We laid out a universal mapping of field logic, business rules, and existing error and off ramping messaging. This enabled an informed and strategic decision facilitation across lines of business of how to come together to one modular flow.

Make risk of indecision feel real

Alongside our service blueprint of how systems connect backstage, it was our visual edge case flows that made applicant pain (and therefore likely negative business-prioritized metric impacts) unignorable and that dependencies and knock-on effects needed to be considered part of “MVP”.

Let nothing go to waste

Our pattern documentation will pay dividends for years to come. A consolidated and widely used resource that helps a distributed design organization stay efficient, creating consistency where it makes sense and above all preventing designers (a portion of them contractors coming in at 3-6 month installments) from reinventing the wheel.

Bring it to life

  • Card sort research on consumer mindsets and iterative testing led to a clear chunking of asks, put in ways that users understood

  • Where possible, we built in visual breathers

  • Built within our design system, we found ways to expand what existed in the library to make way for new behavioral patterns

  • Applications have many winding paths, depending on your situation. We worked to make it clear where that pathing occurs. 

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Make Universal Life work proactively for clients

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CHALLENGE:

Universal Life is a somewhat complicated life insurance product- the business wanted to understand how owners thought about managing their policy over their lifetime. 

This is a multi-actor situation: an agent has sold it explaining it one way, consumers thinking of it one way, and the company thinks of the “correct scenarios” in which to choose this product, ways to pay this product, etc.

Universal Life Insurance - newyorklife.com

KEY WORK DONE

  • Myth-busted clients’ experience over a lifetime of owning a policy

    Managed 1:1 stim-driven research with agents and clients about their experience owning a UL policy, reading their annual policy summary

  • Brought clarity to NYL’s role in client management
    Synthesis across multiple workstreams (data on sales and operations , on agent and client behaviors) 

  • Launched new product feature with client insights driving key decisions
    Connected the dots between a strategic intent and decisions made in technical implementation

OUTCOMES:

NYL launched a new billing feature, including updating its sales interface as well as its client-facing account interface, and added multiple new, triggered correspondence. Qualitative client feedback has been positive throughout, and the company will be reporting out on client behaviors moving forward.

DOING THE WORK

Understand client and agent mindsets meant meeting with agents and clients for multi-hour sessions. Agents showed us the way they would help make sense of the options clients had, and clients brought any recent paperwork with them.

  • We dug into the reasons clients choose Universal Life (compared to, say, other options like Whole Life or Term Life insurance policies) - and compared that to the scenarios the actuaries had had in mind when designing the product

  • We brought to light the expectations that clients have in purchasing this policy - what they thought would happen and why. These mental models proved invaluable in providing our diverse workgroup a new shared language (of what happens not from their theoretical or from the datasets they track, but from the real-lived experiences of clients)

  • And our conversations gave context to the decisions clients made post-purchase

Made the opportunity feel real, and empower all to be accountable for its success

Strategic buy-in is key, and we won commitment for capital investment for updates to the Universal Life product. 

But that is just the first step - a blue-print that hyperlinked to various technical and service teams’ resources was key to the commitment we saw across the organization. 

Launched new product feature with client (and agent) insights driving key decisions

We delivered: 

  • A new way for clients to document their concrete goals in purchasing a product (how long you want coverage for and how much value you intend to have at the end of your policy’s duration)

  • Proactive communications that provided clients the needed information on how they were tracking towards that goal

  • And an option to automatically adjust client’s premiums (up or down) so that they are *only* paying for what they want

This required updates to interfaces across the ecosystem, including NYL’s Salesforce CRM tool (both client and agent facing), their internal policy calculation tool, as well as legacy service management systems.

Documentation was key

Guides covered every team’s aspect of execution, and was updated throughout the multiple phases of implementation.

 

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Creating Assignments

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CONTEXT

Ben Siegel is a math and tech teacher in the Bronx who has developed a tool for colleagues to create and set assignments solving an issue many grapple with:

  • How do you prevent students from sharing answers?

  • How can you make it easier to craft and prepare assignments across multiple classes?

JumblED does exactly that:

  • Teachers create question banks, say sets of easy medium and hard prompts

  • They then create assignments by setting how many easy, medium, and hard questions students should complete.

  • JumblED then does what its name suggests: creates unique assignments by “jumbleing” which questions a student sees in their assignment.

  • Teachers can access thousands of question banks in math, science, and history to build their assignments.


MY ROLE

Ben had created the backbone: JumblED was an MVP already up and running when we connected on this project. My role: support with just-in-time UX strategy and design updates to iterate on features as Ben rolls them out, leading to double the engagement and a 75% increase in key feature usage, for 10k daily users (and growing!).

DOing the work

Mapped out the product strategy behind the problem solving Ben had already done

Triaged UX and UI updates needed for baseline usability improvements to increase user engagement. Teachers needed to know what to expect and what the next best action was.

Built out a more robust design system based on current designs, which will make updates much easier once we focus on the visual design (coming soon)

Built out a backlog logic to help both catalog good ideas as they come and prioritize what should be tackled next (and how this maps back to the product strategy)

OUTCOMES

  • Doubled engagement of new users (who previously signed up but hadn’t taken actions subsequently)

  • Increased number of assignments posted by teachers from 10% to 50% (a key metric demonstrating the value teachers see in JumblED)

  • Consistent positive feedback to site-wide updates from user base

  • A prototype persuaded the owner of an already well-established site of past NY state exams repository to add Jumbled as an export option alongside PDF and DOC

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Improve B2B sales and onboarding experiences

The challenge

MetLife’s US worksite insurance business noticed irregular metrics in conversion and retention across different sized companies. My team proposed a deep dive with brokers and service representatives to understand what drove certain teams to succeed above others.

key work done

  • I designed, ran, synthesized research

  • Created an ecosystem map, journey map & blueprint of front and “back of the house” practices

  • Facilitated cross-team operating model ideation

The Outcome

Our work broke down myths of what made a broker or a service representative successful, and what clients were looking for or expecting from their insurance carrier. The result: an overhauled approach to client management, including adopting new tracking tools and new ways of working.

doing the work

Understand needs of multiple actors

We tailored the research to the type of audience - brokers were a series of phone calls in between their meetings, service representatives shared their screens with us and let us “ride along” as we captured them nimbly switching between multiple applications.

For example, we asked brokers to describe their last couple contracts and hear how they internalized their experience (they attributed differences in support quality as a reflection of the service rep’s tenure). When we sat with service reps, we documented how servicing different sized companies required accessing different sets of legacy systems.

broker-venn (1).png

Gain buy-in across stakeholders on areas of the experience to focus proposed changes

We held multiple sessions across the sales and operations teams leadership to share findings, placing them in context with known practices in the competitive landscape to help create a sense of urgency & opportunity.

journey (1).png

Design interventions to serve collective needs

A key to success here was having a proactive and incredibly committed program manager from the business join the project from kickoff on, who committed herself to following through on the principles and solutions we identified:

  • Reset expectations of which team members were key *at which points in the onboarding process* (aka fewer but right people on a call)

  • Identified ways to better communicate progress and flag needed support (in order to enable the more efficient attending noted above). This included sunsetting an ineffective ticketing inbox, invest in building kanban board style team management tool, committing dedicated time for teams to do real-time stand ups to flag and share workload

from-to.png

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Build design thinking capabilities in-house

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THE challenge

MetLife had invested in developing experience design principles in order to enable creating more cohesive experiences across different lines of business. But teams needed help understanding how to take a business priority and come up with ideas that built on design principles, particularly when it came to thinking outside of the status quo.

Key work done:

  • Facilitated first sets of workshops to diverse stakeholders as a proof of concept

  • Edited toolkit guides, workshop assets, and activity templates (adapting industry practices to MetLife’s culture & internal best practices)

The outcome

I managed the development of multiple toolkits, covering journey mapping, implementing experience design principles, and facilitating design thinking ideation sessions. Teams saw a cohesive approach replicated across multiple business units, which led to a stronger shared sense of ownership. Work was easier to ramp up, and leadership was able to share examples of successes related to each of our brand principles, which made departments new to this way of working more eager to commit to the workshops (and subsequent work to make ideas real).

Setting clear objectives

  • Enable teams across different departments, and different markets globally, to come together on shared challenges

  • Create a scaffolding for problem solving that helped leadership more readily identify at what point in the process and for what types of asks the customer experience and brand design teams were best suited

  • Enable higher volume of design engagements by lowering the effort to prepare for and start initiatives

workshop assets.png

Creating playbooks &
workshop assets

With the support of a great team at Co:Collective and The Design Gym, we created:

  • Templates for table-side activities and ready-to-print files for room-sized panels to ease workshop preparation

  • Guidebooks designed not for all to become practitioners, but to have a place to begin documenting initial hypotheses & identify the right brief for research vendors and executing teams

  • Activities defined not to create a one size fits all, but to establish key standards (what happens, and how well is it delivering) that can flex depending on the project

In addition to providing my own input in best practices, my role included adapting our initial prototypes to fit MetLife’s culture and internal project practices.

Many of our workshops included senior leadership - rather than deliver step by step instructions on how to “do design”, our objective with leadership participants was to make sure we prepared them, empowering them to create the space for teams to change how they worked together.

Success factors:

  • Be clear on how to apply learnings immediately. Make all parts of the workshop active listening - ask participants to jot down connections they see (prompted via placemats / hand outs). Engage prior to work session: have participants bring in a business challenge they are working on in the moment (asking in the workshop session itself without giving participants prep time is a hard gamble)

  • Ensure leadership participants walk away feeling like they have enough of a handle on the "what" and the "why" around design methods and mindsets that they feel confident they can answer their teams' questions as they first begin to apply them in projects

  • Reframe the design mindsets and methods we introduced away from how managers might conduct the activity, and closer to how as a manager you best create the space for others to apply new practices

 
“I managed Ariana Koblitz at MetLife. In that time, she introduced a new practice bridging the outputs of market research to implementation across multiple channels (be it in person, online, or via paper collateral). Our challenge was to bring a variety of stakeholders along the journey, exposing them to new ways of thinking and not letting the discomfort of new behaviors get in the way. Ariana prioritized building strong relationships across the company, in particular with our partner teams in Mexico, Japan, China, and Korea.”
— Jeff Damon, former VP of CX & Design MetLife

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Help agents connect client needs with product features

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The CHALLENGE

MetLife's insurance agents in Mexico are a decentralized group, going from office to hospital to school. They bring forms for their customers, remind them of a past conversation to pick back up on potential product upgrades, and try and connect the dots between a customer's situation in a 5 minute conversation as the customer goes about their busy day.

Key work done

  • Designed & facilitated 2-day dual-language workshop

  • Field diary documentation & share out

  • Storyboarded early prototypes

  • Managed low-fidelity prototype & testing, mid-fidelity prototype iterations

THE OUTCOME

As lead design strategist, my team gathered the New York corporate strategists alongside Mexico office’s operations, field coordination, marketing teams alongside agents to develop ideas to improve how agents engage with their clients. The prototyped tool was implemented across a de-centralized network of agents and set the stage for the shift to tablet use.

doing the work

Building empathy:

Our work starts with understanding how agents meet and engage with their customers.

The Mexico office had a long-standing practice to encourage visiting employees from other offices to shadow agents as they went on their routes. This took team members out to schools, police academies, hospitals, and government offices.

This created an opportunity for lived empathy building ahead of a two-day workshop.

Bringing this empathy into focus alongside business & operational priorities

Teams from Mexico’s office in sales, product, and operations came together alongside team members from New York’s marketing team to work on developing ways agents can more easily connect with their customers.

Workshops can easily become multi-day fatiguing cycles of brainstorming, in which participants don’t feel like the ideas generated are ultimately useful. With the support of Co-Collective, we delivered the workshop with key elements that mitigated these risks:

  • Incorporated prior research to set a strategic focus for the sessions: We organized participants into tables, each table worked on a focus the business had already prioritized

  • Made the experience of the agent equal in weight to the knowledge the business brings: Workshop activities connected the dots between each table’s business focus and the moments they experienced out in the field, as well as inviting agents to join key portions

  • Ensured all could participate fully: Facilitation happened in both English and Spanish; we had professional translators working to help everyone express themselves authentically and comfortably

Making it real:
I supported developing one of the resulting ideas, leading our brand team out of their comfort zone to prototype low-fidelity physical tools. Agents have limited time to reconnect with clients as they do their rounds visiting offices, hospitals and schools - coupled with a perception of complexity, it can be hard to make product features feel relevant.

We developed an analog interactive tool with which clients selected their personal priorities (who they want to protect, what they are saving towards), to then reveal a customized “shortlist” of product features to consider. Testing it in the field with enthusiastic agents in Mexico helped refine the key form factors, prioritizing ease of use in unpredictable locations.

If a client is unsure, they can take the card back home, discuss with family members, and over time an agent can return to this short list for renewed nudges to consider.


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Thinking in Systems

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Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

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Convivial Toolbox

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Generative design research is an approach to bring the people we serve through design directly into the design process in order to ensure that we can meet their needs and dreams for the future. The book introduces an emerging domain of design that is of immense interest today not only to the academic design research community but also to those in the business community charged with the development of human-centred products, systems, services, and environments.

Past portfolios

For a fun stroll down memory lane, and for re-inspiration of what I’ve worked on in the past (and how I’ve grown in the way that I talk about that work), I gather my previous portfolios.



Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas

James Adams's unique approach to generating ideas and solving problems has captivated, inspired, and guided thousands of people from all walks of life. Now, twenty-five years after its original publication, Conceptual Blockbusting has never been more relevant, powerful, or fresh. Integrating insights from the worlds of psychology, engineering, management, art, and philosophy, Adams identifies the key blocks (perceptual, emotional, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and expressive) that prevent us from realizing the full potential of our fertile minds. Employing unconventional exercises and other interactive elements, Adams shows individuals, teams, and organizations how to overcome these blocks, embrace alternative ways of thinking about complex problems, and celebrate the joy of creativity. With new examples and contemporary references, Conceptual Blockbusting is guaranteed to introduce a new generation of readers to a world of new possibilities.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery--these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.

The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation

“The complex business problems we face today can’t be solved with the same thinking that created them,” says author Marty Neumeier in this entertaining and original read. Instead, he says, we need to start from a place outside traditional business thinking. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovations, we can no longer “decide” the way forward. Today we have to “design” the way forward—or risk ending up in the fossil layers of business history.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Every day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life. Michalko’s techniques show you how to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different. With hundreds of hints, tricks, tips, tales, and puzzles, Thinkertoys will open your mind to a world of innovative solutions to everyday and not-so-everyday problems.

 

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Ideas