Understanding what’s needed

Each participant has the ability to re-allocate his/her 401(k) investment portfolio. When users enter the allocations tile (#1), the management further divides into 2 tracks. Managing investment allocation of the money you currently have (#2) and managing how the investment should be made on future incoming contributions (#3). The editing capability is supported in the future money (#4) section, but is not present in another. I bet you just said “huh?”.

Reorganizing information

The very first thing that I have noticed at the start of the project was misplacement of certain information. Left 2 screens shows the existing example and the right 2 screens are proposed revisions. Originally account balance and investment were located in 2 different locations (#1 and #2). Balance was a static piece of information that user couldn’t dig deeper into. During the research, it was clear that users come into the their retirement site to check on their money - how much they had and how well their investments were doing. So it made a very logical sense to merge the balance and performance together (as seen in #3). As for investment, the donut chart (#2) did not provide any insightful information at the dashboard level and all users needed was an entry point (#4) into various investment management tasks.

Navigating within

Along with changes at the dashboard level, investment management also had room for improvement on the structure as well. Rather than asking user to use tabs as a means of navigation, I wanted to make the experience more contextual and more direct. The revised design would list out the available functions up front, rather leaving it up to the user to figure out the navigation. The revised structure also allowed other tasks to be added without embedding the task within other screens or increasing the number of tabs.

What should it say?

One other aspect that was creating a confusing experience was the verbiage used throughout the product. The existing wording were predominantly dictated by jargons that are used by internal associates. During the research, typical users were using a very simple terms, but not always technically correct. In order to find the balance of language between a 5th grader and a college professor, myself, researcher and the PO devised a mad lib exercise that were utilized both on the research as well as an internal session amongst various stakeholders.

MVP and next steps

Due number of project constraints, not every aspect of design intent has been implemented. Below are example screens that have been included in the MVP.