Role: UX Designer, working with a Visual Designer
Project Type: Retirement Platform, Responsive Web
Design System: None
About the Project
VALIC was a subsidiary of AIG that specializes in retirement plans and investments. Their fully responsive website provided consumers with an online hub to enroll in and manage retirement plans.
VALIC provided tools for consumers, focusing on large group accounts such as schools, healthcare providers, and government employees. Users could be at varying points in their retirement savings and have different levels of financial savvy, so the website needed to be flexible enough to meet all types of users. This was an ongoing project to update and iterate on an existing website.
Staying Relevant
The retirement space has a lot of competition, so VALIC had to make constant improvements to keep pace. Maintaining the website required a mix of adding new features and iterating on existing features based on user feedback.
Design was worked on in 2 week Agile sprints which included wireframes and usability tests.
Sprint Testing
As part of each design sprint, I ran a usability test on preliminary wireframes. This served to catch issues early on, so by the time visual designers start working in the following sprint, they are already working on updated designs.
Sprint testing typically happened within a week, with wireframing and prototyping taking 5-6 days and the actual test being fielded via UserZoom and analyzed in the following 2-3 days. Recommendations were presented in time for mid-sprint reviews.
Modular Personas
One of the hardest parts of design is designing for the user. VALIC had taken an initiative to create a series of personas based on real user interviews. Working with Corporate Insights, a research firm that ran the interviews, a series of ‘modular personas’ were created.
Modular Personas aimed to identify key user segments and traits that are representative of user behaviors. By mixing and matching these traits, it was possible to create a variety of representative personas, and to also create a common language when discussing user behavior.
Personal Reflection
This project really helped me learn how to handle design churn. When I first joined this team, there was a lot of churn around design updates, with many updates being based on stakeholder or PM preference. While I became familiar with different methods of handling churn, the most effective method in this case was the introduction of sprint testing every cycle. This allowed for a shift to data-driven design decisions, a reduction in design churn, and faster design-to-development hand off. Initially, I ran all usability studies every sprint, but was later able to educate and mentor my visual design partner to run studies as well, which was rewarding for us both.