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Vanguard

Helping Finance Advisors

Shop for Investment Products

Role: Designer (UX + Visual) at HUGE

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Overview

Vanguard's Financial Advisor Portal provides advisors a new way to shop for investments for their clients.

As part of a larger scope of work including a rehaul of Vanguard's brand and website, we redesigned the Financial Advisor Services portal. FAS is where advisors come to shop for investment products for their clients.

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Working within a small team at HUGE, I was tasked to propose a new UX for the Investment Page showcasing investment offerings, using Vanguard's updated style guide.

User Research

Understanding what advisors are looking for when they're shopping for products

We interviewed Financial Advisors at Vanguard and screen-recorded them interacting with the Investments Product page across a number of different competitor sites to understand better the kind of information they looked for.

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We looked at competitors, including Blackrock and Pimco, and asked advisors what content was most important and how different ways of organizing and presenting information improved or inhibited the quality of their search.

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User research allowed us to narrow in on a few key themes for product exploration.

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  • How might we make the Investment page more digestible and create a better sense of hierarchy?
    The current site had no sense of hierarchy and all information is displayed at the same level. 
     

  • How might we use other ways of searching to inform the way we design the site?
    By looking at different sites outside the financial realm that empower users to search content in other ways, we were able to provide fresh recommendations to the client and advisors. (For example we looked at e-commerce websites like Urban Outfitters, inspiration sites like Behance, and others non-financial sites to get inspired by other ways of searching.)
     

  • How might we expedite the shopping process? 
    In order to accelerate the search process, I explored different ways of organizing and presenting the information to make it more scannable and quickly help advisors find what they were looking for. This included changing the data into data vis and incorporating a sidebar filter to quickly narrow in on specific products.

Market Research

E-Commerce: Shopping for Investments vs Browsing

Looking at sites outside the financial realm allowed me to bring fresh design perspectives to the table. I argued that essentially what financial advisors were doing was shopping — so why not make that process more scannable, visual, and familiar. 

All Investments: Before

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All Investments: After

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"Clio brought fresh UX ideas to the table that we hadn't even considered."

— Alex Bluman, Client Engagement Director

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Final Product

Embracing Industry Standard

Because we were working with a tight timeframe, we weren't able to do user testing so we decided to stick with the industry-standard design but make content changes based on what financial advisors had expressed was helpful information to see. (This info was gathered during initial calls with them at the beginning of the project.) 

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Main changes included:

- adding a tab for 'Performance' and 'Yield' to decrease information overload

- adding the number of results shown 

- re-jigging the prioritization so that the investments displayed reflected their relative importance (i.e. Kind of Investment, Strategy Class, and then Asset Class)

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