Millennium Trust Investment Portal
A case study in pivoting design direction in pursuit of a cutting edge investment platform.
Millennium Trust Investment Portal | Desktop / Mobile Website
The Problem / My Role
The Problem
Millennium Trust is a financial institution that handles 401ks and IRA’s for employees at companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions. Traditionally they are a temporary custodian for customers as they roll over funds from one retirement plan to another. They want to convert these users into lifelong MTC customers.
My Role
- Lead design of Investment Portal workstream to integrate with onboarding workstreams being implemented in parallel
- Work with stakeholders and developers to define requirements
- Design and further MTC Design system
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Objectives / Constraints
The Objective
Design and develop a minimum viable product that uses the new MTC design system and maintains current day functionality of existing Investment Portal (with select new features).
The Constraints
- Use of existing design system that was designed/built in tandem with product
- Product to be a mobile and desktop website.
- Existing legacy micro services like Invest Cloud, Avoka, and Auth0.
- 8 Month timeline
Problem Statement:
How can Millennium Trust retain customers and build lifelong loyalty by creating a compelling and intuitive investment platform?
To align with Millennium Trust stakeholders, we organized and facilitated a workshop for the Investment Portal workstream.
The goals were to establish:
- Requirements
- The target Persona
- Business Goals
- Data dependencies
- Product vision
A workshop for investment Portal at the MTC Oakbrook Offices.
Target Persona
Workshop
Being that we had already conducted a workshop for this project months prior during the discovery phase, we had a good idea of who the personas for the Investment Portal are:
- The Saver – (2.5K avg. balance)
- Passive Investor – (34K avg. balance)
- Active Investor – (300k avg. balance)
- Persona 4 – MTC customers who have not opened an account yet
A breakdown of MTC’s personas, their stats, and the criteria for each grouping.
After some deliberation, the stakeholders aligned on wanting to design the MVP primarily for the Passive Investor.
The long term goal with this persona is to increase engagement and motivate movement towards the Active Investor persona.
Criteria: Invested in a Mutual Fund or ETF, likely to have higher balance than Saver.
A breakdown of MTC’s personas, their stats, and the criteria for each grouping.
Lightning Demo
Workshop
We conducted a lighting demo activity where we sought out competitors in the space and identified the main ideas of their product.
Prior to the workshop we had asked product owners and stakeholders to provide a list of competitors that they admired. The list included a broad range of financial platforms from, Coinbase to Betterment to Robinhood.
As the stakeholders elaborated about what they liked and disliked from each product, we diagrammed and annotated the main ideas.
A collection of sketches, diagrams, and notes summarizing the pros and cons of each product.
Affinity Mapping
Workshop
After the lightning demo exercise, we asked the group to come up with themes that they noticed when speaking through the different product examples.
We then organized these into several categories that we would then prioritize and address for the Investment Portal MVP.
Those themes include:
- Personalization
- Visual Representation
- Guidance / Handholding
- Content, language & tone
- and Education
An affinity mapping of the themes compiled from the list of lightning demo product examples.
Prioritization
Workshop
Finally we asked the group of stake holders to prioritize the themes and provide concrete examples of what they wanted to see implemented in the MVP.
Some of those include:
- Increased use of data visualization
- Iconography with more affordance
- Next steps and nudging actions
- More information and marketing of MTC products
- Casual, human-centric copy
- Breakdowns of data
Groupings of actionable suggestions based on the compiled themes.
Sketching
Ideation
After we had distilled the main themes and actionable takeaways, the design team conducted a brief ideation exercising to capture ideas while the workshop was fresh in our minds.
Initial Ideation sketches after the workshop.
Sketching
Information Architecture
Keeping in mind the MVP features we had identified during the workshop, I used a virtual card sorting exercise to allow users to identify site’s navigation.
The purpose of this card sort was to generate an intuitive navigation. The activity was done remotely using Optimal Sort.
A similarity matrix identifying overlap/agreement in the areas of the website users grouped together.
Sketching
Site Map
The card sorting exercise as well as MTC’s input, largely dictated the navigation of the MVP.
- The navigation was ultimately categorized into:
- Home Page (with Login/Register/account opening)
- “Accounts” Summary/ Holdings/Transactions/ Gain/Loss
- Trade
- Deposits & Transfers
- Documents
- Profile
A workshop for investment Portal at the MTC Oakbrook Offices.
Revised Design
Prototype
It was time to take what we had learned from the workshop and build a revised Investment Portal design. This prototype was largely used to test functionality and did not have many of the bell’s and whistles that we planned to include in the final MVP.
A workshop for investment Portal at the MTC Oakbrook Offices.
Revised Design
User Testing
Over the course of two weeks, we facilitated usability testing for the Millennium Trust Investment Portal. These sessions consisted of:
- 45-minute remote sessions via Zoom
- Introduction and product overview (3 – 5 minutes)
- Background questions (3 – 5 minutes)
- Figma prototype evaluation (30 minutes)
- Wrap-up (5 minutes)
A workshop for investment Portal at the MTC Oakbrook Offices.
Emergent Themes
User Testing
After relistening to all the zoom interviews, we syntehsized the notes via Miro and affitnity mapped them into groupings where emergent themes became evident.
Users generally felt:
- Confusion around Financial terminology
- Validated our design direction
- Were interested in becoming more investment savvy & would like to be guided
A workshop for investment Portal at the MTC Oakbrook Offices.
Week 4
High-Fidelity MVP
After the first couple rounds of user testing, I was ready to implement the new learnings to the designs. With the design system in hand, I set out to produce high-fidelity mock-ups.
Flow 1:
Home Page
The homepage is intended to show a high level overview of a user’s account activity. This is the hub where users can see a list of all of their accounts, their overall market value, educational articles, and have common quick actions like adding funds etc.
Flow 2:
Account Summary
The accounts section is the core of this website. The summary page provides an account level summary of a user’s account value as well account level actions. We learned from users that they expected to see the ability to add and withdraw funds from this section.
Flow 3:
Account Holdings
The holdings page is one of the most data rich pages in the Investment Portal. It contains a table of all of a user’s holdings as well as valuable data points, like the quantity of a particular security and its market value etc.
The donut chart supplements this data with a breakdown of which assets that user holds.
Flow 4:
Account Transactions
The transactions page summarizes all security buys and sells that a user conducts. Adjacent to it is a summary of what assets these transactions fall into
Flow 5:
Trade
The trading workstream is slotted to be conducted in the future. For now, the Investment Portal will have an I frame of the Invest Cloud Trading page.
Flow 6:
Deposits & Transfers
It was important to include a landing page that houses user level actions. User testing revealed that these actions would be better suited at the account level, but MTC stakeholders maintained that they would like to have it in both places and test this in future releases.
Flow 7:
Documents
The documents page is where users go to find tax documents and other generated reports. Originally, the documents page lived in the accounts section. Testing revealed that users desire to see documents of each account amasses in one area, hence the decision to break it out into its own page.
Flow 8:
Profile
Finally, the profile page. Because of certain dependencies of external services like Avoka, Auth0 etc. This page would generally be a landing page linking to those services in the interim while we implement ability to update ones password and beneficiaries within the Investment Portal Itself.