Kyros Wealth Management
Kyros Wealth Management is a professional team that oversee the financial affairs of a growing select group of closely-held business owners in the manufacturing and professional services industries, working and retired professionals, and international expatriates.
OVERVIEW
The aim of this project was to design a strategic UX plan catering to the user needs. Conducting user research to understand user needs was an integral part of this project.
PROJECT INFO
UX Strategic Plan
5 weeks execution time
3 person team
ROLE
UX Researcher
(Facilitate Interviews, User Research, Usability Testing, Ideation)
LEARNINGS
Qualitative Interviews, Usability testing, Card sorting, Internal Website Review
The Problem
The purpose of the website was unclear and call to actions (CTA’s) were missing throughout the website. The nav bar and sub pages needed to be more organized catering to user preferences.
Carlos Salmon, founder of Kyros Wealth Management required insights from his customers on how to enhance their experience while working with him. The only traffic on the website at that time was to validate the founder and his business.
Without a strategic plan, it was impossible to target and retain new customers. The website would be their first interaction with the company.
Target Audience
Kyros has a diverse set of customers, the core clients being business owners and medical professionals. In addition to the core clients, they also serve current and former clients from Otis & Carrier.
Our research focused on clients who were business owners and employees working at Carrier.
They hired Kyros for Private Wealth Management as well as Retirement Plan Services. These two are the services majorly provided by Kyros.
Process
Discover
The initial stakeholder meeting helped us understand the immediate business goal was to increase revenue sales by increasing user engagement. The user engagement on the website was only to validate the business and the founder. Therefore, the aim of the website redesign was to increase and retain website traffic by engaging with new prospects.
User Research
The user research was essential. Multiple user types, their interactions and their experience needed to be laid out in detail. In order to achieve that, we gathered as much information as we could from the end users to understand the challenges they faced and what changes they expect in the website.
Qualitative Interviews
The first step was to recruit participants for the qualitative interviews. The stakeholder provided us with 8 participants who were his clients and asked a series of questions like:
What factors made you hire them as your wealth manager?
What details you expected the founder had mentioned in the initial meeting?
What were your thoughts after browsing the website the first time?
How frequently do you login to the client portal?
Does the website portray a clear understanding of how the company functions?
What changes would you like to see in the website?
Usability Testing (existing website)
After empathizing with users and understanding their mental model, our team proceeded with the remote usability testing with the existing website. This step immensely helped us while designing our plan as we observed the participants complete the given tasks. They even expressed how they would like to see certain sections on the website. Some of the tasks are listed below:
Could you book an appointment with a wealth manager?
Could you join the Insider’s list?
Could you login to the client portal?
What services are offered by company?
By now the participants understood the website to a great extent. The next step was to complete an open card sort activity. Several categories were provided to be grouped according to their understanding. Optimal sort was used to complete this activity. Some of the participants even explained why they grouped and named certain categories together.
Insights from user research
The extensive user research landed us with following insights and helped us to make our design decisions. The priority of the participants was to book an appointment, login to the client portal and to explore about the company and their services in detail.
During the interviews, we noticed that participants appreciated the personal relationship and constant communication initiated by the company. The participants were impressed with the wealth management strategies suggested in the initial meeting. They expected the founder to talk more about his transition as a financial advisor in corporate America to founding his own company.
During the usability testing, we observed that participants were having difficulty to book an appointment and were taking longer than expected to complete the tasks. The number of clicks to complete a task were more than required number of clicks. The card sorting activity helped us to improve the information architecture of the website.
Ideation
Now that the research was complete, our team proceeded though an initial brainstorming session. Our team gathered the user insights and formulated possible design solutions to overcome the challenges observed during user interviews and usability testing.
Some of the ideas brainstormed by our team are listed below:
Initial Sketches
These sketches below solved the user complications and prioritized the business requirements and user needs.
Our design introduced Call to Actions (CTA's) on every page of the website to encourage increased conversion rates. The flexibility to allow users to view the financial advisors calendar and book available appointments focused on enhancing the user experience
Usability Testing (redesigned website)
As the developer was implementing the design solutions suggested by our team, we conducted a second round of usability testing. In this phase, the major pain points were solved. The same set of participants were involved during this usability testing. The goal was to compare the results from the previous usability testing and cater to the required changes.
Insights from usability testing
Overall, feedback from the site was positive. Users remarked that the site was clear, informative and intuitive.
Compared to the early usability testing, users were able to book an appointment with reduced number of clicks. The users appreciated that they could choose the meeting time upfront than having to go back and forth to find a common meeting time with the financial advisor.
The users noticed the "client login" button on the nav bar and mentioned that would save time and effort to login to the portal. They found the pages and the content to be well linked to each other and the category names on nav bar were now easier to comprehend. However, the users mentioned they would love to feel a human connection with the website and have a brief video of the founder on the home page.
Limitations
The 5 weeks timeline was one of the major limitations of this project. If given more time, we would design hi-fi wireframes and a prototype to conduct usability testing before implementing the design solutions. The next steps would be to analyze the implemented solutions and reiterate the testing phase.
Lessons Learned
This project contributed a great deal to strengthen my user research skills, as this project went through rounds of feedback from my instructor, stakeholders and most importantly the users. During this project, I learned new research techniques which reformed my design skills.
Apart from my technical skills, I also got to strengthen and leverage my communication skills while facilitating meetings and interviews with stakeholders and users. I build a relationship with the stakeholders and stayed in contact even after the project deadline. I followed up with them and gave them a detailed analysis once the website was launched.
After completing this project, I realized that UX Research is what I love and enjoy doing the most apart from my design skills. I’m eager to conduct user research in my future projects, so I get to empathize with users and solve their pain points.