Morningstar
Unifying a legacy financial offering for a modern audience.
Morningstar’s flagship retirement solution helps investors get on the path to financial freedom and security. As the first retirement solution offered by Morningstar, this legacy product had a couple of significant opportunities that my team needed to address.
OUR CHALLENGE:
Retirement savers were opting-out of the service within 12 months of their enrollment date.
OUR GOAL:
Increase the retention rate by 20% and have users stay in the service longer than 24 months.
THE OPPORTUNITY:
Participants that stay in managed accounts longer have a better chance of meeting their retirement goals.
A 20% improvement would yield $500k in incremental annual revenue.
Discovery and insights, crafting content and a narrative that investors can understand.
We tackled these problems by understanding the behavior and mindset investors have when approaching retirement. We conducted over 100 investor interviews and surveys, listened and read over 5,000 investor calls and emails into our Support system, and shadowed advisors as they enrolled investors into a retirement solution.
We took all our findings and built a content map to detail the mentality, sentiment, and vocabulary we heard from investors. We took this sentiment and aligned it to the various user journeys and touchpoints. This enabled us to better communicate with participants at the different stages of their investor maturity.
A detailed atomic design system.
After we established our content strategy and refined value proposition, we were able to redesign the experience and visual language for our retirement and fiduciary offerings. We started by using the Morningstar Design System and layering on top of that system, a product-specific layer more detailed to our content and user needs.
Fit for all screens.
The legacy software was not initially designed for responsive viewports. So we recorded and redesigned the software to fit all screen sizes. This required us to rethink all our content, patterns, and visuals and how they needed to flex for smaller screens.
Clean, crisp, and consistent.
We wanted to maintain consistency throughout the software with a clean and crisp UI that stayed true to the Morningstar global brand, but that also updated those brand elements to feel more modern and consumer-friendly. Therefore, we created and added icons, illustrations, photography, and elements that played on the historic Morningstar look and feel but refreshed the application and all marketing materials.
