Enabling Financial Advisors to Reliably Scale Their Client Presentations
ORGANIZATION Northwestern Mutual Planning Solutions
MY ROLE Product Designer
TIMELINE January 2023 - June 2024
Northwestern Mutual (NM) is a life insurance company that works with financial advisors to sell their insurance products to clients. To that end, NM offers a number of tools in their software ecosystem for financial planners and advisors, as well as for their clients to plan, discuss, execute on, and track their recommended financial paths. My team does design work for the Planning Solutions tool (PS), where planners can enter their clients’ facts and financial goals, create a recommended course of action, and present these recommendations.
This case study focuses on the last step of the PS journey, creating a plan presentation. Plan presentations feature over 100 PDF pages that are auto-generated based on the data entered in the financial plan. It is referred to as the plan’s output, and can be configured to include, exclude, or reorder any of the generated PDFs. Over the course of 18 months, I worked to improve the templating functions for these presentations, allowing our users to create more complex presentations quickly and at scale.
Business Case
The planning tool allows users to create up to four potential financial paths for their clients to compare. These paths are called scenarios, and extensive user research has shown that when planners use multiple scenarios, they are:
More likely to turn prospective clients into clients
More likely to sell them a life insurance policy
Better positioned to sell multiple policies per client
Following this data, much of our usability work aims to incentivize using more scenarios; this comes in the form of more customization, higher efficiency, and increasing our users’ trust in our tool.
Users
Financial Planners
Planners are the behind-the-scenes players, preparing and finalizing plans and client materials under the guidance of advisors. They usually engage in:
Entering client data into the planning tool
Configuring the resulting PDF presentation
Troubleshooting issues in the software
Financial Advisors
Advisors are the client-facing players who gather facts from and present recommendations to prospects and existing clients. They usually engage in:
Analyzing financial projections (such as net worth, insurance value, return on investments, etc.)
Leading client meetings and explaining financial concepts
Problem Space
Field research showed us that the plan presentation space presented a few barriers to creating more complex plans at scale:
Content Overload: Generating an output meant contending with over 100 PDF pages to include, exclude, or reorder. Extra scenarios meant a lot of extra pages
Inadequate Organization: Included and excluded pages were treated the same way in the interface
Unreliable Functionality: A user could only create a template out of an existing presentation, and didn’t know if applying the template to a new presentation would work they way they expected
Lack of Flexibilty: Sections in the presentation tool were static and not meaningful to our users
The current state of the Plan Presentation tool. Please note that the images thumbnails have been redacted.
Features
Primary features to incentivize more complex planning:
Separation of included and excluded pages
Section flexibility to structure included pages
Search and filter functionality to find potential new content
An agnostic template builder that included saved sections
Secondary features that boosted discoverability, collaboration, and transparency:
Template sharing functionality
Greater visibility of template selection
A signifier for when a template has been applied
Testing
After designing the proposed features, my product partner and I worked closely with our research team to put a mid-fidelity prototype in front of users and gauge their reaction. The researcher conducted 8 moderated tests where the users walked through the prototype themselves with her guidance. These concepts were met with a lot of excitement and helped us prioritize features and refine the prototype for handoff.
“[This design] allows us to tell the story that we want as a team...and to pick what is helpful and relevant to our clients.””
“I’m excited about a lot of the things I saw today. It seems like [this will] make templates and presentations easier.”
Final Design
Please note that page thumbnails contain proprietary information and needed to be redacted.
The new Plan Presentation tool
The new template manager
Reflection
This project was originally posed to me as an issue with finding and applying templates. As I worked through the problem, it was clear that the issues with the plan presentation space ran much deeper. Not only does my solution add clarity to the process of creating a client presentation, it cuts down on repetitive steps that were stopping users from using the full functionality that the Planning Solutions team offers.