Case Study 1
TD Ameritrade Funding & Transfers
About
TD Ameritrade is a former financial services platform with over $1 trillion in client assets at the time. The redesign made the funding and transfer workflows more user-friendly, transparent, and speedy, eventually saving the company costs from call volume and manual paper processes. The newly designed funding feature was awarded the best among brokerage competitors, and the new full account transfer workflow resulted in a 12% increase in full account transfer submissions.
Client
TD Ameritrade
Role
Senior User Experience Lead
Project Summary
As Senior User Experience Lead, I worked within an agile team to redesign the account funding and transfer processes, making it easier for clients to fund their accounts. We completed preliminary research to understand users’ needs, hosted workshops with business stakeholders, and worked in two-week sprints as the first agile team within the company. During this work, there were separate initiatives happening in parallel—to update the entire platform’s look and feel, several updates to back-end technology, and implementations of new industry regulations. Working in agile allowed us to make incremental changes while so many external factors that would impact our designs were also in flux. I coordinated with other teams such as the mobile app team, to ensure that all of the changes to the client’s transfer experience were cohesive across different touchpoints.
Business Goals
→ Reduce call volume related to funding and transfers, which costs the company money.
→ Reduce manual paper processes related to account funding and transfers, which is also costly.
Design Challenges
1
The previous securities transfer and full account transfer were manual paper processes where clients had to print on paper, sign, and mail in. By contrast, the new funding workflow had to be an instant online workflow.
2
The previous design had inherited legal and technical jargon, and had paragraphs of text on the transfer forms. The new design needed to be visually organized and have removed confusing labels and technical jargon, so that clients can complete the process more easily on their own.
3
The previous design was not responsive (mobile friendly), whereas the new design would need to be responsive for different screen sizes, so that clients can complete the process on any device.
4
The previous funding workflow (below) had over time been split across disparate sections: “Overview,” “Cash Transfers” and “Other Transfers,” making way-finding difficult and resulting in a significant call volume of clients who wanted to fund their account. The new design had to be intuitive and easy to complete quickly.
5
Multiple separate initiatives within the company such as main menu updates and overall UI updates occurring simultaneously with this project created some dependancies and tricky timing decision.
Design Process
Journey Map
With the help of a journey mapping session with multiple stakeholders, I created a user experience map of our existing persona, to highlight the problems of the funding experience, as well as listing the tools and systems involved.
The following is the desired workflow experience and the positive feelings associated with this desired experience we are aiming for.
Testing & Iteration
The project involved incremental improvements using an agile iterative approach. I tested various layouts for the deposit/withdraw selection screen. The following wireframe did not test well compared to a vertical list, because participants did not expect to scroll further down to find more options beyond the top three.
The following is the deposit selection screen after several rounds of testing layout, content, and findability, and applying UI design.
The entire workflows for the different transfer methods were redesigned. The following screen shows a workflow to deposit cash (“contribution” here because it’s an IRA account type), using the Electronic (Bank ACH) option.
Back-End Logic
The behind-the-scenes complexities of transfer logic between 45 different account types (ex: Trust account to Roth IRA) were meticulously designed around, to understand what form fields to display.
Several archaic programming and user-facing bugs were fixed. I worked together with subject matter experts, content specialists, and the legal team throughout. The following screen shows more complicated logic based on the account type, with some of my annotations to developers in yellow.
Final Design
The following screens show the finished designs for an account transfer scenario, a workflow that used to be a print, sign & mail process, now converted to a 4-step digital process that could be completed online in minutes. Note that by this point, TD Ameritrade’s main menu had already been updated as well, a separate initiative in the company as the website overall was being redesigned to be fully responsive, and also affected our menu design.
We confirmed our placement of this transfer process in the menu with a click test.
Pulse Insights (an in-page microsurvey tool shown with the blue header bars) was used to gather and monitor feedback. The first screen is showing “How did we do?” and a thumbs up/ thumbs down rating approach at the end of the competed transfer process. On the second screen, we wanted to understand why users cancel a transfer process mid-way, so that we know whether this workflow needs further improvement.
Of the people who cancelled the transfer process mid-way and answered the brief survey question, 25% said they cannot find their brokerage firm on Step 1. As a result, we made some slight adjustments to further clarify the wording and spacing on Step 1. We wanted users to understand that they can start typing in their firm name to display their firm, unless they can quickly spot their firm logo on one of the top eight searched firm icons below.
Outcome and Achievements
After successfully launching, the new full account transfer workflow surprisingly resulted in a 12% increase in account transfer submissions, and substantially reduced the cost from manual paper processing. Overall, this project received a lot of attention within the company and was a success, being the first time the account transfer process of bringing assets from another firm into TD Ameritrade became digital and completed in mere minutes, compared to the previous print-fill-mail method which took weeks.
Additionally, the newly designed funding and transfer process for moving cash and other assets received an excellent rating, and a gold award from Corporate Insight, a competitive research firm.
Additional design projects
The objective was to redesign the client-facing retirement platform for small business retirement plans, using the new style guide and pattern library. I worked closely with developers to refine the data visualizations and overall finished product.
Similarly, I redesigned the employer-facing Plan Management platform for small business retirement plans. The outcome was a simplified website with clear navigation.
