The Challenge

AARP’s financial security team wanted to develop a suite of interconnected digital experiences leveraging behavioral economics principles to help promote financial wellness, but was not sure where to start.

My Role

As lead experience designer, I managed the project from initial concept through MVP rollout, leading a large working group in a highly-matrixed environment through a complex series of vendor engagements, research and design sprints, third-party integrations, and policy and legal reviews.

Outcomes

The successful launch of this experience represented an unprecedented collaboration between AARP’s public policy, experience design, digital, IT, content, and marketing groups. By leveraging human-centered, iterative design practices and leaning into a just-enough-research approach, the team was able to deliver a de-risked experience that solved an acute consumer pain point unaddressed by the current market, demonstrating to the enterprise that the public policy group is willing and able to produce innovative products and services. The social impact experience measurement framework we designed and implemented allowed us to longitudinally track users’ behavioral and financial outcomes, informing future iterations and providing the foundation for new features.

Activities

• Discovery and scoping: Identified stakeholders for working group, managed RFPs, and defined scope, timelines, and deliverables for design and development vendor engagements.

• Vendor management: Primary point of contact for research and development vendors: wrote business cases to secure funding, participated in daily standups, facilitated review and approval of vendor integrations, deliverables, and invoicing.

• Stakeholder management: Drove agendas for core team meetings, defined cadence for larger working group sessions, developed storytelling materials for internal roadshow, collaborated with policy experts on content development and approvals, presented to executives to secure buy-in and budget, worked with IT teams to facilitate necessary integrations. 

• Secondary research & market scan: Contributed to analysis and synthesis of market research to understand the landscape of direct-to-consumer fintech offerings as well as best practices for interventions based on behavioral economics principles.

• Focus groups: Worked with a vendor to define research objectives and approach, outlined recruiting criteria, refined interview guides, and participated in a series of focus groups that surfaced opportunity areas to focus on for MVP

• In-depth interviews: Collaborated on research objectives and interview guide for a series of IDIs; solely responsible for analysis and synthesis, delivering a series of high-impact insights that drove product and messaging strategy.

• SME interviews: Conducted, analyzed, and synthesized interviews with internal and external financial experts to inform product positioning and content strategy.

• UX research: Oversaw vendor test strategy for full design and development lifecycle, from lo-fi concept evaluation through usability testing.

• Content strategy and creation: Primary copywriter and fact-checker for UX and marketing content, including onboarding flow, complex personalized workflows and assessments, microcopy and wayfinding elements, and ongoing engagment efforts.

• Metrics strategy and implementation: Defined KPIs for balanced scorecard and behavior change measurement framework, drove analytics implementation, and developed reporting on performance against scorecard.

Deliverables

• Research artifacts and documentation: Collaborated on current state journey maps, contributed to recommendations based on UX testing results, sole author of insights based on IDIs.

• Product roadmap: Led overall product strategy definition and drove timetable for MVP launch and subsequent releases.

• Prototypes: Contributed to iterative design process for MVP and subsequent releases.

• MVP and launch plan: Ensured timely delivery of MVP and helped define launch and marketing strategy.