Role: UX Designer, working with a Lead Designer
Project Type: Retirement Platform, Native Mobile
Design System: None
About the Project
VALIC Mobile was a newly designed native iOS app for VALIC, an AIG subsidiary that specialized in large group retirement and investment plans for consumers in healthcare, education, and government organizations.
With a limited feature set, the VALIC mobile app was targeted at users with less time, who may not need the full functionality that was available on valic.com. Nonetheless, consumers may have had varying levels of financial savvy and were at different points in their retirement saving journey, so the app had to be simple and flexible enough for all types of users.
Native App Design
One of the goals when we designed the Valic iOS app was to take advantage of native mobile features. This included flows for face ID, touch and swipe interfaces, and smooth micro-interactions.
Mobile Prototyping
While designs were created in Sketch, the entire mobile app was also prototyped in InVision to better help stakeholders and engineers see breakpoints and move through flows.
The prototype was also leveraged during usability testing every sprint cycle. The design process had virtually no churn as feedback from users helped validate designs and prioritize day 2 fixes.
Personal Reflection
The biggest challenge in this project was figuring out how to approach data heavy pages, such as retirement asset allocations and breakdowns without making the design feel cluttered or overwhelming. There was a huge focus on information architecture and hierarchy to surface the most important information at the top of the screen, and allow advanced users to scroll down to get details if they wanted it.
This project also had a lot of prototyping moments that InVision couldn’t support, such as a vertical number picker when changing contributions, or the way tabs and toggles were meant to slide. The Lead Designer and myself were familiar with different prototyping tools, so he would tackle some animations in Framer, and I would work on others in Axure. It was really interesting coming together to share these micro-interactions with users during testing and with engineers during development.