This project followed an entire development life cycle; beginning with discovery and ending with a deployment to millions of customers.
UX Discovery
UX discovery is an initial phase in the design process where I gather information and insights about the project. This involves:
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meeting with stakeholders
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conducting industry research
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defining goals and objectives
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creating user personas
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establishing the project scope.
The goal of UX discovery is to gain a deep understanding of user needs, pain points, and business requirements, setting the foundation for informed and effective UX design decisions.
Transamerica is very supportive of this step. Business holds a refinement meeting 3 days a week where UX and business refine work for developers. UX also holds 3 meetings a week where business can show up and see what we are working on.
UX also has a weekly 2 hour design review where we discuss and work out user flows, user journeys, design interactions, verbiage, and anything related to the design part of the experience. This proved to be very valuable.
Places of concentration for this UX Discovery:
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The users
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Gaps, missing areas that would prevent from achieving the user case
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Identify risks or doubts
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Needs vs desires
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Project scope
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Engineering limitations (although I don't always consider this when designing, but I like to know them so I can defend choices if needed)
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Variations
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And of course learning everything I could about the complexity of IRAs.
Competitive Analysis
During competitive analysis I examine and evaluate the user experiences throughout competitors' sites. This involves studying their interfaces, features, user flows, and overall design choices to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities where we can improve.
The goal is to gain insights that can inform the design process and help create a more compelling and user-friendly product.
In the case for Transamerica, I made sure to examine at least five top competitors. I made sure to understand and complete, or attempt to complete, the use case I was working on from business:
Give enrolled users the ability to digitally contribute to their IRA
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Places of concentration for this competitive analysis:
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Information Architecture (ia)
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Design interactions
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Micro-interactions
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Page layout
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Verbiage
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Accessibility
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Content
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Site navigation
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Links
User Jouneys
User journeys are also part of UX discovery, but I am highlighting it here because with new work, journey mapping can be complex and take more time than enhancing an already existing asset.
This step in the process proved to be incredibly important for this project. During the diagramming phase I uncovered that there was not a way for users to link external bank accounts. Without this ability, a user cannot make a contribution. Having found this issue during this discovery phase allowed us to pause and look at the entire project again, and although this looks like scope creep it is not, and we found a way to include it.
Discoveries during user journey mapping:
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Users don't currently have a way to add a bank account
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Users don't have a way to remove a bank account
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Users will have different options based on a bunch of variables and a data check in the beginning of this journey is necessary in order to show the correct options on the UI
Lo-Fi Wireframing
Low-fidelity wireframing serves as a means for effective communication among teams, delineates the path for iterative enhancements, and, in the end, aligns the perspectives of business and design regarding the user experience.
In this phase, it became evident that the complexity exceeded what was initially revealed in the user journey phase. It revealed that is was important to incorporate variations, given the involvement of multiple participant types making contributions.
Discoveries during user lo-fi wireframing:
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Users need supporting content; faqs, i bubbles, content on the page, or something. There is specific information the user would need if order to make an educated decision about contributing to their IRA, and feel good about it.
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Areas that could cause confusion​
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rules around "catch-up" contributions​
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understanding that your IRAs are combined and the total is the total to the IRS.
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people could easily over-schedule if signed up for recurring contributions
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we need to not only protect the users from over contributing (but allowing to over schedule), but let them know we are protecting them
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might confuse people if the user has capacity to contribute to last year and doesn't understand why​
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I presented these findings to business, but was told that faqs and supporting content was not included in this release.
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Although not including necessary aspects for a user to make an informed decision is high on my list of No's, I decided not to make a big deal about this, but instead I kept track of the identified places of risk in the flow and continued wireframing. ​
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Included in my wireframes I put comments on 'sticky notes' about what / how supporting content is important to the user's journey. (spoiler alert: the supporting content was eventually approved and included in the final designs)
High Fidelity
The high fidelity phase is meticulous but, when executed accurately, lays the foundation for streamlined and consistent work processes.
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I prefer to build master components with the minutest elements. This approach within a white label design system minimizes potential inconsistencies and facilitates the utilization of the same library by multiple teams.
