Role: Lead Designer, working with a Visual Designer
Project Type: Retirement Calculator, Responsive Web
Design System: Designed alongside the project
About the Project
The YMCA Retirement Fund (YRF) is a non-profit retirement fund that serves YMCA employees in the US. The company was undergoing a tech transition and business and development agreed to start with one of the most useful features of any retirement website - the retirement estimate calculator. The goal for the MVP was to create feature parity with customer service tools while allowing development to switch to a React-based front end.
An MVP for Feature Parity
The design needed to allow quick estimates for the majority of the user base to run estimates quickly, while also including additional features for advanced users that were closer to retirement and looking to explore different retirement scenarios.
Iterative Research and Updates
Before beginning development, an interactive prototype was shared in 1-on-1 interview sessions with end users. This user testing identified high priority improvement areas that would need redesign, while allowing development to begin in more set parts of the experience.
Pivoting with the Business
Before the original MVP could launch, senior leadership began to move the company messaging and experience to a simplified model. Rather than feature parity for advanced users, the focus shifted to clearer messaging. This allows the calculator to shift focus as well - rather than a scenario exploration tool, the same calculations were used to create an Retirement Tracker, letting a user “set and forget” their preferences and focus on their projected savings growth. This final version of the calculator received positive user feedback for making it easy to see how close to their retirement goals a user was, and what small increases could mean for their future savings.
Personal Reflection
As the first collaboration between a new in-house development team and business stakeholders that were used to waterfall development, this project was just as much about breaking down silos and introducing the YMCA Retirement Fund to a different way of working. This project represented many “firsts” for the organization including being it’s first agile project, and first usability study. The highlight of this project for me was feedback from stakeholders after the first usability study readout, who were excited to see and hear directly from participants. The success of the study made senior leaders excited to do user research as a key step in all future work.
I was also thrilled with the pivot and final design for the project. I had raised the idea of a “tracker” vs. a “calculator” during the discovery phase of the project, but it was not in line with business goals at that time. The retirement tracker that went live was able to fulfill all the original goals of the project (feature parity and tech updates), but in a much more user-friendly way.