Mobile App
My Role: UX Designer
Merging 2 apps into one redesigned experience that helps Transamerica customers manage their retirement planning.
The goal of the Transamerica app redesign in 2020 was to merge the 2 Transamerica apps in the Apple and Android app stores at the time.
The first (TRS Retire app) was built several years ago and allowed the user to perform a number of robust transactions from checking their retirement account balances to updating their asset allocations.
The second (Wealth & Health app) was very heavily focused on marketing, encouraging users to both save more for retirement while taking care of their health since “Your health is your wealth.” It did not offer the same financial transaction capabilities as the previous app. Instead, it emphasized “journeys” that the user could complete to achieve various health or wealth related goals such as walking more every day or increasing their retirement contributions.
Despite these very different approaches, both apps had terrible reviews (averaging 2 stars) in the app stores. The goal of the redesign was to merge both of the apps while making improvements to address the negative reviews.
To start, the team dug into how the apps were not meeting users’ needs and expectations by first analyzing the app store reviews. For the Wealth & Health app, the unsatisfactory reviews could be bucketed into 4 categories:
To start, the team dug into how the apps were not meeting users’ needs and expectations by first analyzing the app store reviews. For the Wealth & Health app, the unsatisfactory reviews could be bucketed into 4 categories:
Actual quotes from app store reviews:
"I want a retirement app that helps me manage my 401k, not track the donuts I’m eating."
"I've never seen an app that asks a million questions just to login...then once you get into it it's a worthless app!"
"You can't even see your own investments!!! Any opportunity I have, I preach to my employer to switch the 401k provider. If it was up to me, I would have never signed up for this trash even if someone put a gun to my head!"
For the TRS Retire app, users were generally happy with the financial transactions they could perform using the app. The negative issues primarily had to do with performance issues and not being able to log in because the system was down.
Next, the team did some informal guerrilla user interviews with users in various stages of retirement. We set up shop in Milk Market and asked users to complete a survey about their retirement planning. Then, we had them do a card sort of features that were important to them when checking their retirement accounts. Finally, we had them click through a prototype of the TRS Retire app and give us their thoughts on the app and the process.
We found that users were primarily interested in their account balance, rate of return, asset allocations, and contributions. They liked the robust functionality of the app and were curiously about goal setting.
A competitive analysis was conducted on other financial services apps to understand current trends and how our competitors were structuring their apps.
We discovered a few common themes:
Because we were now merging 2 apps and increasing the number of features available in the app, one of the first things we needed to address was the navigation. Our goal was to add all of the financial transactions in the old app and highlight features users found most valuable while ensuring they could still navigate through the app easily.
The menu and navigation needed to accommodate the following:
To start, the design team did a workshop where everyone brainstormed and sketched out different ideas for the navigation.
After much discussion and product owner input, the team decided to move forward with an approach that included the following:
After fleshing out the menu and navigation, the team put the design through a round of usability testing. The user was asked to perform transactions such as changing their contributions, finding their vested balance, change plans, and view loan details. The goal was to see if the navigation and menu met the user’s expectations and that they were able to find everything easily.
We found that users were able to navigate through the app using this new navigation. Even if they were unfamiliar with the app initially, users would tap through the different menu items at first and learn the navigation pretty quickly as they performed tasks.
Quotes from users:
“Attractive and easy to find most of the information I was looking for.”
“I would say it was very easy and user friendly.”
One of the features I designed for the Transamerica app redesign is the OnTrack® retirement outlook tool, which is a service offered by Transamerica for their retirement plan customers.
Using a weather forecast theme, it shows users on how close they are to meeting their retirement goals based on their current contribution rate, asset allocations, current salary, retirement income goals, zip code, and other factors. OnTrack® also allows users to project how their outlook would change if they increased their contributions or changed their retirement age so they can make decisions to get closer to their goals.
The goal of OnTrack® is to get users more involved in their retirement planning by increasing their contributions or updating their asset allocations to meet their goals.
OnTrack® is a tool that has been offered to Transamerica customers for several years through their legacy app (TRS Retire app) and retirement web portal.
Throughout the years, users have given positive feedback (through reviews, surveys, usability testing, interviews) about OnTrack® and the weather forecast motif. During a usability test of the TRS app, all users were quick to explore the OnTrack® section and liked the instant projections provided by the sliders.
However, there were areas that could also be improved. It was unclear to users what the purpose of this feature was, how the outlook was generated, and what they were meant to do other than play around with the sliders. The OnTrack® interface traditionally relied on tiny paragraphs of disclaimer text to explain this to the user, which they did not read.
Since OnTrack® was a mature Transamerica product, I started out by trying to understand how it worked and what the limitations were so that this information could be conveyed to the user.
The retirement outlook is generated by calculating how much retirement income the user is expected to have by their chosen retirement age (based on current contributions, asset allocations, current annual salary, additional sources of retirement income and expenses) and how long it would last them, based on their projected life expectancy (factoring in gender, zip code, etc.).
The actions that the business wanted to encourage were increasing the user’s contribution rate and updating their asset allocations (or subscribing to a paid Transamerica service that managed the user’s assets for them).
Based on these findings, I mapped out a user flow to understand how a user would move through the flow and how to help them take their desired action efficiently.
In redesigning the OnTrack® experience, my goal was to keep what was working for users while making it clear to users how the retirement outlook was generated and how they could take action.
Since users reacted positively to the weather forecast and the sliders, I kept these components in the redesign. I added tooltips with contextual information and clear call to action buttons so the user could easily navigate to updating their contributions or allocations.
