Lead with Digital Design Sprints
The business senior leadership challenged the client experience groups to develop methods and a process that would allow for faster design iterations on concepts generated both from internal needs and client insights. This process would be light weight, nimble and cost effective. It would identify things to explore further and quickly access ideas that failed. In a program called Lead with Digital, I lead Vanguard’s client experience teams in design sprints modeled after the Google Ventures process.
Design sprint process strategy
Working with our business partners and within the existing structures in Vanguard, I was tasked with outlining the high level strategy for how this design sprint process would integrate into our organization. The resulting plan helped to align all stakeholders involved, created a consistent language, set expectations and defined our metrics for success.
taxes - Design Sprint 1
A major internal business goal was to reduce call volumes during tax season. The hypothesis was that a ton of call volume could be reduced by highlighting some core information and documents that investors were seeking during tax season. We were tasked with exploring ways of making it easier for users to use our website for these key tasks to reduce the need for them to call for help.
taxes - design Sprint 2
Leveraging the insights from design sprint 1, we ran another sprint on reducing tax season call volume. This second sprint further explored ideas that worked well and avoided concepts that failed from the first sprint. One of the key insights developed for this sprint was a segmented approach to better serve diverse investors during tax season. The result of this second design sprint became the foundation for a multi-year, multi-million dollar over-haul of the tax center on Vanguard’s retail website.
life events
Research and client interviews confirm that life events are a major factor in people making financial decisions. Life events have the power to completely change ones financial portfolio. They are often dramatic, forcing people to deal with heavy emotions, new routines and family dynamics while having to make very big decisions on the correlating finances. This concept was to explore life events in a way to organize relevant information, products and services to make these transitions easier with less stress.
quick advice
Some users have life-long relationships with financial advisors, others take a more DIY approach. No two people are exactly alike, and even the most knowledgeable, self-directed investor might a question once in a while. This concept explores a feature that would allow for a in-context quick advice session with a CPA from the Vanguard retail website. This would potentially drive higher conversions, make investors more confident and support them with advice services that requires less commitment or expense of a full-time advisor.
