Life Plan
A digital tool to set and track your goals
Redesigning the next evolution of a financial wellness experience for 11+ million users.
PLATFORM
iOS, Android, Web
MY ROLE
Principal designer.
Wireframes, visual design, research support concepts, design direction
THE TEAM
PL, 2 Designers, Content Strategist
Introduction
Life Plan is Bank of America’s most rapidly adopted digital experience that provides personalized guidance and helps clients track their goals through every phase of their financial wellness journey. Since its nationwide launch in late 2020, Life Plan has become the bank’s most rapidly adopted feature of all time with more than 11+ million users.
Even though many users created a Life Plan, past research showed that Life Plan fell short in engagement. Using Bank of America’s human-centered design approach, the team evolved the next evolution of Life Plan.
My role
As a Principal designer, I’m responsible for overseeing work horizontally. This initiative was high-profile, so I was closely involved. Responsibilities included directing and designing the overall vision, mentoring, partnering with CXO and Digital on business drivers, and crafting and presenting executive readouts.
Problem statement
Many Bank of America clients have created a Life Plan, but engagement numbers are low due to a confusing journey, disjointed IA, and a missed opportunity to make it a more robust goals feature.
What we discovered
We assessed key insights and findings from a recent research study: Life Plan Customer Testing (Assessing the current state of Life Plan)
Finding #1: Difficulty comprehending the concept
Users struggled to understand how the different elements within the experience came together to form a comprehensive "Life Plan" as expected.
Finding #2: Content strategy is confusing
Almost all participants misunderstood text labels/copy within Life Plan because they did not accurately capture what the section was about.
Finding #3: Tracking goals are important
Personalized goal setting and tracking is the primary reason customers want to engage and re-engage with Life Plan.
Finding #4: Lack of clear journey
Customers were unsure what journeys" were and felt the actions were things to do but ended up just being articles to read. It felt lackluster and redundant.
"Break it down. Simplify what you see on Life Plan. It feels like clutter for me." - Participant 2
How might we
How might we not only engage users but keep users re-engaged in Life Plan?
How might we integrate investing goals in Life Plan to broaden our user base to Merrill clients?
How might we rethink the information architecture to help users with navigation?
How might we simplify the UI to allow users to comprehend the journey.
Key factors for success
Grow customer awareness & engagement
Create a more informed, educated, and empowered client
Deepen existing relationships
Build trust and create quality engagement with a focus on customer relationship-building
Drive sustainable business growth
Customers convert from non-savers to savers; savers to investors.
Deliver integrated experiences
Enable seamless customer access to the breadth of Bank of America’s products, services, advice, and guidance.
Process
Idea Generation
I led idea-gen activities with the team and provided a framework in which we should tackle concepts such as:
Outline the user and business problems
Re-visit the framework of Life Plan. What are we seeing? What ways can we simplify this?
Think of a crawl, walk, run solution. Sketch a phased approach and start with an ideal state or “Northstar” vision of Life Plan that can be used as an artifact to uncover gaps or align strategic visions for all of the bank’s digital products.
Create a research plan, and using the bank’s design system, rapidly ideate hi-fidelity mock-ups to validate through testing.
Wireframe and wireframe..
I typically start off by facilitating sketching and wireframing sessions. The wireframes below are ones I contributed to help pave the way for the design team. While it’s important for us to ideate based on the frameworks we developed, we should push our concepts beyond that to help further evolve ideation. The more we push, the easier it is for us to peel back for delivery.
What did we test and learn?
Study 1:
Open-ended concept evaluation and click test
Output:
Recommendations for overall understandability, framework, and structure for summary screen
Challenge #1:
Past research shows users are unsure of the purpose of Life Plan and it felt like clutter.
What we learned:
For testing, we simplified the framework and created a “dashboard” focused on the #1 feature, goal tracking, and education as a secondary element. The simplified design had the most accurate and most focused response when we asked participants to guess the purpose of Life Plan.
~67% of participants identified this as a space where you can financially plan short-term and long-term goals.
Challenge #2:
Users felt the word “journeys” was confusing and unsure what it was.
What we learned:
By re-labeling journeys to “To Do”, many participants understood this was a section meant for guidance and next steps, but some thought this was another advertising area.
Success rate = 53% of participants correctly identified journeys.
Study 2:
Open-ended concept evaluation
Output:
Recommendations for overall direction on providing guidance and next steps per focus area.
Challenge:
This was a debate amongst design and product partners. Most of our product partners wanted a step written out on the goal cards to encourage engagement, whereas most of the design team felt it would be cognitive overload.
What we learned:
When asking users which design they preferred, they chose the high-level # of steps due to its simplicity. Knowing how many steps are important to users because it more meaningfully serves as a reminder there are things to do and compels one to take action.
46% of participants preferred # of steps
28% preferred a detailed step.
Final designs
Based on research results and business goals, below are the final screen designs and the decisions we made to build the next evolution of Life Plan.
Enterprise solution: Integrated Merrill Investing goals alongside consumer savings goals to cater to more client types.
Goals-centric: Created an organized goals-centric dashboard that showcases the client’s plan that they set up post-onboarding.
Consolidation of content:
A single insights container anchored at the top for better findability.
“Journeys” were renamed “To Do’s” and are contextual to the life focus.
Added tertiary elements in a Quick Actions section at the bottom to condense the UI.
“Summary” screen
Focus area screens
Removed top tab nav: This was intended for high-level priority names, but we streamlined the nomenclature and removed the 7 Life Priorities.
Removing the 7 different Life Priorities eliminated an extra layer of complexity from a technical, content, and navigational perspective.
Instead, each screen is catered to the focus area vs. the priority, allowing each screen to be specific content and insights.
Renamed and organized section headers for easy navigation and comprehension.
“Take Action” is now renamed “Checklist” and contains actionable steps vs. filler articles, allowing the user to have better guidance.
As a business requirement, we designed a “Just for you” section for products, offers, and experiences.
As a business goal, any one of our KPIs, we want users to go from savers to investors. As part of the scope, we allow users to create either savings or investing goals.
Screen 1: I designed a decision point screen for users to select between creating a savings goal or an investing goal.
Screen 2: If a user selects investing on screen 1, they will be brought to a second triage screen to select from 3 investing approaches
I chose Illustrations for these screens for the following reasons:
Micro-illustrations do a great job adding character to each product option while subtly helping define the differences and meaning behind each option.
Our key users are young Millennials and Gen-Z and we want it to have a friendly design since young users feel investing can be difficult and daunting.