Helping Arkansas and Nevada residents
save for their Children's Education
RESPONSIVE DESIGN . PRODUCT DESIGN . RESEARCH
RESPONSIVE DESIGN . PRODUCT DESIGN . RESEARCH
OVERVIEW
Ascensus helps people save through partnerships with financial institutions and state governments. As of 2022, the company had helped over 15 million people save for their future by offering tax advantaged savings accounts for retirement, education, healthcare and for people living with disability.
Designed in 2012, public facing websites like Arkansas and Nevada had a lot of usability and performance issues. We redesigned the sites to improve the user experience and drove enrollment rates by 10%
MY TEAM
Solo Product Designer with guidance from the Design Director, Product Manager, Marketing Manager, & 2+ Engineers. Also partnered with Client partners - Program Director & Marketing Manager from the Arkansas 529 Program
MY ROLE
Responsible for in-depth research, working closely with client partners to craft the end to end design of the web experience.
TIMELINE
September 2021 -Dec 2021, Launched in January 2022
FINAL SOLUTION
The Challenge
The site was previously developed with limited feedback from the users and content didn't do a good job of motivating users to browse, learn and enroll in a 529 program. The site also had performance issues and had a high bounce rate of 70%. Our client partners were also unsatisfied with the incremental updates we were making to the old site. They wanted improve their online presence and drive conversion rates. Our high level goals were to:
1. Design a site that would make the 529 plan more easy and accessible to our audience.
2. Build trust and confidence so that the user feels comfortable signing up for a 529 plan.
3. Improve client partner relationships so that we can retain our customer base.
Discovery
The next step was to analyze our competition. We wanted to benchmark our own UX design against industry standards and best practices. By understanding what our competition is doing well or poorly we hoped to find areas of improvement and opportunities to differentiate ourselves in the market.
What we learned
What we learned from analyzing these sites was that besides providing a simple, clean and modern UI they also offered a clear and compelling value proposition and provided better support for savers by actively refuting misconceptions, providing feedback, and offering flexible saving goals to better motivate them to sign up for a 529 plan
User Research
The first thing we did was to send out a survey to gather as much data as possible about our users demographics, budget behaviors, saving patterns, general familiarity with a 529 plan and their approach for saving for college.
After reviewing the survey data, it was clear to use that our target users were Arkansas residents with beneficiaries ranging from new-born to 13 years old. In order to get a better understanding of the user we spoke to our users by conducting moderated user interviews and usability tests. By doing this, we we were able to capture how they were using our old website and what value they took from it. We learned that our prospective users needs and goals mostly changed based on two things - their household income and the age of the beneficiary. Based on the data we collected, we grouped our personas into three distinct categories: The hesitant Buyer, The decisive Buyer & the Indecisive Buyer.
Talking to Prospective users
While surveys offered valuable quantitative data from a larger sample size, user interviews allowed us to have more in-depth conversations with individual users, gaining a better understanding of their thoughts, motivations, and experiences. By combining both the survey results along with user interviews, we were able to form a comprehensive picture of our target user.
Some of the major pain points, these users felt when browsing the old site was the site's navigation. They also said that the site was confusing, overwhelming and didn't motivate them to open a 529 plan. The content on the website was also lacked hierarchy and these users came away from the experience with a lot of unanswered questions.
Key Findings
Based on the usability test we conducted, some of the important takeaways were:
So how might we communicate the the benefits of a 529 plan in a more understandable way?
How might we alleviate their anxiety around investing?
How might we instill trust and build confidence so that they can be motivated to open an account?
We think that the difference between these three questions should be clear. Not all users are financially savvy and are anxious about making investment choices themselves. 529 websites also generally lack specific information about their approach and mission and – who is behind the plan– and information about the concrete use of money. For financial institutions especially, it is important to build trust.
Possible solutions to gain understanding, alleviate anxiety and build trust would be:
Getting everyone on the same page
Then we decided to gather our cross functional teams and collectively build a rough user journey map. This was a way for us to align our thought process and build a unified vision for the brand new website. This helped us align team members, clients, and other stakeholders on the user experience goals, identify areas for improvement, and facilitate discussions and decision-making based on a shared understanding of the user journey.
The Redesign Process
Content Audit & Card Sorting
The next thing I did was to run a content audit to make sure I capture everything that was part of the old website. The next challenge was to propose how we display content on the new website. So performed hierarchical card sorting exercise with members from our Sales and marketing teams . I used this technique to determine how they grouped content, which pathways offer the least amount of resistance and which features and functionalities of the website should stay, be relocated or be eliminated based on our website's information architecture.
The results highlighted that we need to prioritize plan benefits and saving stories that motivated users to save. And also group content based on their relevancy and context. The categories our internal teams chose fell into the predictable patterns I had hypothesized earlier and this allowed me to create the rest of the browse structure.
Sitemap
To give you some context, the sitemap for the old site liked this: The content was nested in deep hierarchies and that made it incredibly hard for the user to find information they were looking for.
Once I had gathered all the data from the card sorting exercise, I created a few variations of the sitemap to visualize the overall information architecture of the website. Our goal was to simplify the navigation as much as possible and not overburden the user with too many links or pages. So we narrowed our focus into 4 main pages. - Homepage, Plan Benefits, Investment Options, About Us and Help Center.
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Once i had a better sense of the overall architecture, we narrowed down multiple user flow options and created mid fidelity wireframes and prototypes. This served as a foundational step as they allowed us to visualize the structure and layout, facilitate communication, prioritize functionality, support iteration, identify usability issues, enable collaboration, and offer cost-effective design exploration.
Usability Tests
We recruited a total of 6 Arkansas residents that matched our target user through a recruiting agency. Through use of a screener, we screened for parents who are interested or have heard about 529 plans and had a mix of experience in browsing different enrollment sites. Sessions were conducted on remotely on Userzoom. Each session lasted around one hour. Our goals for the testing were to:
1. Test discoverability and usability of new interaction flow
2. Validate the new information architecture
3. Learn about user behavior, especially around their familiarity and motivations towards saving for college
Key Findings
#1 Simple navigation makes it easy for the users to discover pages and easily learn about 529 plans
Users found it harder to access and find relevant information on the older site due to its complex navigation. This made us reconsider the nnavigation and pair it down to make only the most important areas visible to the user.
#2 Users don't have time to go through the entire site, they need easy and quick access to information
Users lead busy lives, a website should not only meet users where they are but also make information readily available to them. We solved this problem by breaking information into digestible chunks and making it easily readable so users don't have to dig deep to find this information.
#3 Users had a lot of unanswered questions about qualified expenses
Users wanted to know how this plan would effect their financial aid and scholarship opportunities. Also needed clarification around 10 % penalty. We solved this problem by creating narratives that resonated with user's lifestyle that would give them the confidence they need to open a 529 plan.
Putting it all together
Once the feedback was gathered from our users, it was time to integrate it into our designs and put it all together. I created the High Fidelity mock ups and put together a documentation system with detailed specs for all the elements and components on the site. This detailed design system was used to communicate requirements to engineering teams, quality assurance teams and ADA compliance teams to test different use cases.
Design
This gallery below shows some of the website designs for the Arkansas Website
You can view and interact with the live website here
Validation
The changes I made were received positively from users. I also did two usability testings to gauge the effectiveness of the new design. Users' subjective satisfaction with the new design (4.3/5) was 139% higher than the original design (1.8/5). This is what some of our users had to say
I feel more confident about signing up for a 529 plan after visiting the website
Sharon Kelly
I trust this website a lot more than the older site.
Peter
I like how the information is broken down. It alleviates my anxiety around making investment choices.
Sylvie
It is not overwhelming or daunting. I love the way information is broken down. Also the narratives used on the site resonated with me
Alexa
The navigation works for me. I like how simple it is
Lisa
The site piqued my interest and makes me want to sign up for a 529 plan
John
The Impact
The initiative to modernize and redesign the public website was conceptualized to achieve three main goals: Increase enrollments, Improve client relationships, and improve the technical foundation and ADA compliance for our public web. We analyzed the data a year after the site was live and found out that
Users' subjective satisfaction with the new design (4.8/5) was 139% higher than the original design (1.8/5).
The site also outperformed. We saw Arkansas site drove enrollments by 10%.
Year end survey revealed that our client partners gave us a NPS score of 9.2 for the redesign
Challenges
The biggest challenge for this project was navigating external client relationships. As the sole designer, the task of convincing the client about the design decisions we made along the way seemed like a big challenge at first, but we soon realized that the best way to bridge this gap was to bring in customer feedback early on in the process. A few other notable challenges were working within the interaction constraints of the development and marketing team. Some of the design decisions had to be kept on the back burner mostly due to lack of man power and data availability. Also, understanding the needs of families residing in Arkansas and Nevada was a new problem space for me. I want to thank all the amazing individuals who participated in our research including our talented internal marketing and development team at Ascensus who helped turn this project into a reality.