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Retirement Planning

Fidelity Investments
Product Design. 2022


Only around half of Americans have savings in retirement accounts, and even fewer have a plan in place to help them meet their retirement goals. Plans can help determine income targets, evaluate spending expectations, and create a vision around one’s ideal retirement lifestyle. This case study identifies common barriers that customers face when creating a retirement plan in the current experience, and proposes a new path to planning centered on ease and longterm engagement.

Problem

Onboarding to the retirement plan is a multi-step process



The existing planning flow takes users through a multi-step onboarding process, presents estimates based off of the inputs gathered during onboarding, and concludes on the retirement plan page. From data and moderated user research, we surfaced several pain points that we wanted to address in MVP, including difficulty finding the entry point, too many form intakes, opaque calculations, and not enough payoff when users finally arrived on the retirement plan page.



A user’s points of engagement

How might we soften fears around retirement planning?


Our business goal is to engage the 3.1m households who are <59 years old and non-planners. Our target user Leah exemplifies this user profile. She lives in Colorado with her husband Tom and two kids. She’s the primary financial planner in her household. Without an advisor’s help, she’s not confident that she’s making the right financial decisions for her and her family. Primarily, she wants to know that their current savings and ongoing contributions will afford them the life they want to live when they retire. How might we help Leah and her family set up a retirement plan that feels easy, engaging, and accurate?


Launching a more automated plan creation flow
Zooming out


We know that customers who create a plan with an advisor tend to have high confidence in the value and accuracy of their plan, but self-directed users often feel that the analysis they get does not accurately reflect their situation. How might we quickly connect customers with value, give them retirement estimates they can trust, and show them how best to take action on their plan?

Solutions in stages
Existing > MVP > Future vision


We conducted two rounds of moderated user research - one to address the existing planning flow, and another round after MVP was launched. These insights, along with in-market data, informed two rounds of the product’s redesign.


Stage 1: MVP
Streamline onboarding &  create transparency


Data revealed that users were dropping off at the first form intake in the existing planning flow. Additionally, we learned in moderated user research that people wanted to know if they’re getting value out of the tool before spending time entering their personal information. Our solution was to think about a way to show value at the beginning of the journey by leading with insights. To address these pain points, we launched proactive planning, which pulls basic data from a customer’s accounts to generate a retirement plan without asking a user to fill in the information themselves. We also make these numbers transparent, so that users can understand how their estimates were calculated.



Step 2: Future vision
Eliminate onboarding & get to the point


The future vision targets the following KPIs:
  • Drive more engagement from the homepage by creating a one-step onboarding process.
  • Encourage re-engagement through scenario modelling, creating a bridge between analysis and next steps.
  • Maintain updated personal information (household details, retirement age, accounts).
  • Convert self-led users to managed accounts when users feel ready to establish an advisor relationship.