Fidelity Labs: Exploring Online Investment Proposals

Sector: Financial | Investments | Proposal My Role: Design Lead | Strategist | Hands-on Creative Lead

Challenge

The investment proposal is a critical decision point for acquiring new customers and expanding relationships with existing ones. Our task was to identify the key decision drivers across different customer segments and uncover what would make them choose Fidelity over competing options.

Customer Interviews- Understanding Risk

We started our research with an ethnographic study interviewing individuals about how they assessed risk in general, seeing how they spoke about risk in their lives as compared to risk with their investments.

Interviews were conducted at District Hall in Boston, conducting 1:1 interviews with 8 individuals ranging in various demo’s while still fitting into the overall range of a Fidelity wealth customer.

User Sentiments

From customer interviews, clear themes emerged around how people perceive risk in their daily lives and investments. These insights helped define the core customer problems to solve and highlighted the barriers to address when assessing risk.

The direct quotes from the interviews injected life and emotion into how we thought about positioning and defining our objectives.

Defining the Customer Insight

Customers struggle with emotional inertia in the decision-making process, often experiencing anxiety and fear that prevent them from moving forward with investment decisions.

Show how Fidelity Managed Accounts offers value over both their direct and indirect competitors, establishing a clear understanding of how Fidelity MA’s is right for the user’s needs and goals

High Level Design

Through wireframing and customer journey mapping, we identified key moments where trust, guidance, and clarity were critical to the experience. These artifacts not only highlighted customer pain points but also shaped the design strategy, ensuring solutions were intuitive, reassuring, and supportive throughout the investment journey.

Investment Proposal Wireframes

Through testing we found that users wanted to know:

1. Who can I contact when I have questions

2. How much do I need at retirement and will I have enough

3. Is this personalized for my needs

The work was the catalyst to begin a funded project to overhaul the online proposal experience from the initial in-branch experience to receiving and reviewing the proposal online.

In addition to the prospect acquisition, the proposal that is sent to prospects was designed and tested. We tested multiple concepts to arrive at the types of content, hierarchy, and language that would drive the most conversions and considerations.

Business goals

1. Establish Fidelity as a trusted investment partner

2. Show the value of a Managed Accounts ongoing service

3. Make a clear path to conversion

Learnings and Outcomes

The work was the catalyst to begin a project to overhaul the online proposal experience from the initial in-branch experience to receiving and reviewing the proposal online. The research and learnings influenced how the larger Managed Account customer persona reflected investment risks and assessments.