Increase advised and self-directed client engagement by creating a meaningful risk assessment tool to motivate clients to consult a Morgan Stanley Financial Advisor for in-depth guidance on their finances to grow their wealth.

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Founded in 1935, Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm that helps people, institutions and governments raise, manage and distribute the capital they need to achieve their goals. The Wealth Management team helps people, businesses and institutions build, preserve and manage wealth so they can pursue their financial goals. Since February 2021, I work as a Senior UX Product Designer where I lead  the Strategic Portfolio Analytics squad within the Wealth Management UX Team.

INTRODUCTION
In February, 2021 I joined Morgan Stanley’s Wealth Management User Experience team as a Senior UX Product Designer. My role was to assume leadership of the Strategic Portfolio Analytics squad for Morgan Stanley Online and lead the Risk Assessment product through the second phase of the proposed product lifecycle and kickoff the initial redesign of the Performance product.

BACKGROUND

The Strategic Portfolio Analytics squad’s focus is to help Morgan Stanley Advised and Self-Directed clients to make better informed financial decisions about their accounts, holdings, risk tolerance, and exposure to market volatility. All of Morgan Stanley’s clients have different expectations, goals, and time horizons; yet almost all share the common goal of wanting their assets to grow over time. Qualitative UX Research and Analysis over the last year helped define this problem and product gap to solve for both our business and clients.

PROBLEM
Increase advised and self-directed client engagement by creating a meaningful risk assessment tool to motivate clients to consult a Morgan Stanley Financial Advisor for in-depth guidance on their finances to grow their wealth.

PRODUCT GOALS
Our goals were to build Risk Assessment tools to help educate all Morgan Stanley Advised and Self-Directed clients to better manage their financial goals and expectations; build trust and relationships with MS Financial Advisors, and most importantly grow the number of advised clients and assets. As a new page within the Morgan Stanley Online > Accounts > Portfolio Analytics > Risk Assessment, the initial experience would guide how users engaged with our new offering.

 

1. Educate users to better understand investment risk.
2. Manage goals, expectations, & risk tolerance.
3. Build relationships with MS Financial Advisors.
4. Grow the number of Advised Clients and assets.
5. Help all clients access informed financial guidance.

COMPETITORS
Competitors not only showed aggregate account risk values, but provided simple tools to educate and inspire their users to make better financial decisions. Many of our users experienced these tools elsewhere and asked Morgan Stanley to build similar tools to better understand risk. Recently Morgan Stanley acquired E*TRADE as part to shore up their efforts to reach and communicate more effectively with more customers who may not understand as much as they would like.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Deemed internally as an extremely complex project, with contributions and opinions coming from multiple business stakeholders, it was my responsibility to:

  1. Identify prospective audiences and conduct structured UX research.
  2. Design strategy concepts and present multiple creative options.
  3. Educate and build trusting relationships with multiple stakeholders and Product Owners about the UX process.
  4. Contribute with opinions, UX expertise, and advocate for the user needs through research and data analysis.
  5. Lead the Strategic Portfolio Analytics squad through research, design, development, and deployment.

SUCCESS METRICS

As I took over leading the squad from one colleague, analyzing competitors along with reviewing and conducting structured UX Research with the team helped me to articulate our user groups and define the success metrics for the primary problem we were aiming to solve.

KPIs
We measured our customer success metrics and KPI’s by several key factors.

  1. How engaged our users are with the products, tools, and services we offer?
  2. How many conversions, new business, and assets have come underneath the firm’s umbrella?
  3. Have we increased advised relationships with our Financial Advisors?
  4. What feedback have we received from user over all of our touch points?

WORK
A sample of the forthcoming experience is shown below.

KPIs
We measured our customer success metrics and KPI’s by several key factors.

  1. How engaged our users are with the products, tools, and services we offer?
  2. How many conversions, new business, and assets have come underneath the firm’s umbrella?
  3. Have we increased advised relationships with our Financial Advisors?
  4. What feedback have we received from user over all of our touch points?

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
My first project was to create a Competitive Analysis deck with two UX Designer colleagues analyzing the product offerings from E*TRADE, Personal Capital, and SigFig.

USER PROFILES
Morgan Stanley defines six User Personas, though four are within the core audience. I kept attention upon our defined core Morgan Stanley User Personas and focused upon Jim the Validator as I compared and contrasted the current landscape of financial Risk Assessment tools.

STRATEGY
Working with the Product Owner and Fleet Lead, I mapped out pros and cons for each viable strategic option as I iterated upon the tactical design work.

CONCEPTING

As I iterated with design options from informal sketches to wireframe concepts for both Individual Accounts and aggregated All Accounts, I reviewed my work weekly with the Product Owner, Business Owners, Fleet Lead, Development team, UX Copywriter, UI Team, and UX team colleagues to improve each concept; which were based on research and data analysis.

PRIOR RESEARCH

Prior to my joining, the team had conducted UX Research upon Concept Testing and Envisioning Research to help define user pain points, product need, and goals for further research.

RESEARCH GOALS
Working with our UX Researcher, we conducted our Target State Validation research phase. As our findings and work evolved, we needed to conduct usability to validate the content strategy of the proposed designs for the All Accounts Risk Overview and Individual Accounts pages. Users would turn to these pages to learn how risk could affect their account holdings within the aggregate and individual account level.

RESEARCH PLAN

As the strategic work was formalized, I led the effort to conduct user research with our UX Researcher, designed several iterations of all pages within the desktop, tablet, and mobile experiences for which I built clickable prototypes to review with all members of the team, stakeholders, and research participants. We conducted five targeted research sessions via UserTesting.com to help us test and validate our hypotheses, user goals, and work.

WIREFRAMES
Working with cross functional teams such as UI, Development, Business, Legal, and other product verticals, I worked to design, build, and refine solutions that adhered to our Design System and Style Guides, along with our business objectives.

FINAL DELIVERABLES
The formalized wireframes were approved. Final designs were completed along with detailed exports denoting the exact placement of components and elements for all new and updated pages. The development strategic work is currently within development and is slated to be released in September, 2021.

PERFORMANCE
As I iterated with Risk Assessment, I also worked upon redesigning the Performance product. My initial work was to define our business and user goals, competitors, and direction.